A new conference?

Saturday's exploratory meeting about setting up a new cross-disciplinary conference in London got a great turnout, with eighteen of us - including James Crabtree, Ann Light, Tom Coates, Tom Dolan, Hugh Look, Jamie Wilson, Gavin Bell, Matt Webb, John Knight, Nancy, David Wilcox, Cal Henderson, several more Toms (Steinberg, Morris...) Paul Hammond of that fish site ;-), Neil M of the Grauniad Online supplement.....- and apologies received from a host of others who couldn't make the meet but who also wish to be involved, such as Dave Green of NTK (others whom I saw later the same day - such as Jane Austin - with her dad in tow!). We just about took over the Photographers' Gallery cafe for the afternoon...

I was trying to - trying being the operative word - to chair, so didn't take comprehensive notes myself, but here are a few notes scribbled both at the meeting, at the post-meet meal, and at the eminently civilised post-food club (thanks Tom D!)

What's it about?: The idea is to address the area of people (not 'users') and tech, with a particular emphasis on 'what people can do for themselves'. The failing of so many 'tech' conferences - newspaper supplements etc. - is that they address the 'what it is', while failing to assess the 'what it means' (except in terms of naive futurology). We'd like to exploit that failure and address it. But we're also interested in 'where disciplines meet', the idea of 'crossover', a getting away from increasingly narrow 'disciplines'.

Ann Light came along with some Norbert Wiener quotes she mentioned to me a few weeks ago and seem apposite: 'the greatest breakthroughs in human understanding were likely to come from the intellectual no-man's land between academics and specialisms'; 'boundary regions...are areas where the traditional methods simply don't work'; 'when faced with a big intellectual puzzle, scientific disciplines tend to do two things: throw lots of man-hours at it; and divide up the task...' and more.

We want to address the other stuff, the jigsaw building, the stuff that is not addressed by the carvers-up and the task-dividers, getting people out of the groups they have formed already, bringing together people from parallel, overlapping worlds.
But we recognise that someone who is an expert in one field may be a beginner in another - and we are interested in both, so any conference programme needs to be explicit and clear about labelling strands in terms of audience/level.

When asked what they would like to see, the list of priorities was by no means dominated by ideas around blogging, though they were certainly present. As one blogger said, "most bloggers want to go and talk about other stuff" or words to that effect.

putting people in control of tech
use, access, control
online communities
blogging
user experience
experience design
social software for individuals and business
social software learning from human-computer interaction etc
personal publishing
adaptive personal technology
eccentricity, DIY approach to products
technical intercommunication aspects of blogging (linking sites, trackback, following discussions, RSS)
user moderation
social side of sites like K5
solving the reading problem
self-organising systems
blogging in context
distributed conversations
media creation and distribution > IP and the art of the possible
ethnographic techniques (mentioned several times)
evaluating systems
the subtleties of tech
past stuff eg social history of the Net
and future stuff, inc ubiquitous computing
broad range of other stuff such as mapping, Perl
geocoding, mobile, location isues, portable stuff
wireless networking
people moving around and using information > ethnography
creativity tools
how organisations innovate in this area - war stories
multi-media games meets drama theory
deviant behaviour, devance (several votes)
real-world benefits (of all this stuff)
political emphasis, use of tools for political/democratic ends, how blogs can involve people in politics
grassroots enabling stuff such as the Beeb's ICAN
tech for campaigning and similar
using tech to reverse the brain drain
social aspects of tech (several votes)
sociology meets social software
selling this stuff to the sceptics (plus the presence of some sceptics to listen)
addressing the area of "people are not buying a lot of this stuff") ie injecting a note of realism to the ever-positive tech commentators
separating out 'what it does' and 'what it means'
technorealism, technoscepticism
really long-term thinking: 5-10 year models, trends (not tools)
utopian and dystopain views
think-tank-y
for it to have created something
fun - silly - entertaining things too
a range of groups, including business and children

and who we want to hear - ideas included:
mavericks, visionaries, pioneers
hearing from people who have made things, rather than those who have written about them

Panels and tutorials got many votes, while 'bringing people together to see what happens' was also popular. The idea of a seminar of seminars (to quickly find out what's been happenening everywhere else - 'cos we can't all go to all the conferences) also proved popular. Beehive approach (lots of different cells, in the same location, organised by different groups? - this would reduce workload on the centre). Or idea of core activity with lots of fringe stuff organised by others - or is this 'fringe as centre'?

The meeting noted that stuff presented at places like ETcon is not necessarily original/new at all at the time of presentation - talks are often recycled from smaller events. We should therefore not be frit of bringing recent stuff out of specialised groups for a more mainstream/public audience - as well as a sprinkling of the more up-to-the-minute.

In terms of size, format, the consensus seemsed to be to aim for a 1-day event with perhaps three rooms to start. Success could then be built on by expansion.

There were many ideas about venues: the idea of a "music school" arrangement, with multiple practice rooms, or small rooms with a large atrium area or syndicate rooms, got many votes. We appreaciated that it is important to be able to mingle - this is the main value that many people report getting out of conferences. We'd also like to be able to have a central location, with lots of chairs and desks, local food and pubs, and preferrably wi-fi enabled. "I quite like the idea of slightly scruffy" said one. That seems to include LSE/KCL/Birkbeck etc.

And what about dates? February or spring as a target date seemed to be agreeable to most.

While people at the meeting and the post meeting discussions came up with a number of ideas on the sponsorship front, suggestions for potential sponsorship targets are welcome.

We might also consider learning form past conference experiences, such as last year's XCom, which took place in London (Dave Green/NTK), Beyond the Backlash (James Crabtree), Virtual Communities conference (Hugh Look; next year in The Hague), and maybe CSCW (http://www.acm.org/cscw2002/), Door of Perception http://www.doorsofperception.com and Reboot (Copenhagen).

As the idea of 'deviant' seemed popular, I've given the working title of SODIT or Society and Deveiant Technologies to the interim Yahoo Group set up to continue these discussions:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sodit/