Exclusion from participation

Although in retrospect, I think Liz Lawley and JD Lasica were just making ham-handed attempts to get people to overcome the limitations of the space by mandating participation only from certain rows, it still does not sit well with me. Over half the audience was sitting in rows that were excluded. Most notably, the core group that always attends these conferences were sitting in the front rows that were not excluded. So, it kind of boils down to excluding those you are not comfortable with.

In my experience teaching in rooms very similar to the one where the conference was held, it is incumbent on the discussion leader to get out in the audience, not the other way around. Frankly, the speakers should have taken this job on themselves. It makes me wonder about the extent to which these two actually wanted a genuine two-way conversation.

Getting more participation

One of the issues with the conference is that it is temporally bounded. Of necessity, this limits participation. The single change that would most affect this would be to unbind the conference from temporal constraints. Some simple things would be to publicize the tags for the conference ahead of time and make tags for each of the sessions, not just the conference as a whole. Have the session organizers post resources a week in advance and then open up aggregation on the session tags. Leave the session tags open from there on. Also consider creating a blogroll for all of the people who attended the conference.

Some other things might help. Perhaps, technorati could enable blog tagging for how you think your blog fits into the conference topic(s), or there could just be a simple place for people to do this at the conference site.

Also, I continue to be tremendously intrigued by Kaliya Hamlins' ideas for creating identities. What I envision here is that people create a profile or publish a profile that they think fits with the conference. They then use this identity for this conference and others like it so that you can find new resources via people you met at the conference. Obviously, SPAM potential is high, but the idea is intriguing.