Going Solo

I posted some thoughts about attending conferences over on Climb to the Stars, now that the madness of SXSW is over. Writing this post has brought me back to the reasons for which I gave Going Solo the format it has. Of course, a “small” conference is easier to organize (this is my first event), but that’s not all there is to it.

Going Solo is a 1-day, 1-track, limited-audience conference. A few words about each:

• 1 day: most conferences are multi-day conferences. If people are going to fly in for your event, more days makes it easier to justify the travel.

  However, I’ve noticed that sitting in a whole day of sessions and doing the same thing the next day means that my brain fries. So, what do we do, when we go to a 2- or 3-day conference? We don’t attend all the sessions. Which is cool, because it gives us more networking time, and we all know that the most we get out of conferences is on the networking/contacts/hallway conversation side.

  But on the other hand, if I put a great programme together, wouldn’t I want the attendees to my event to get the most out of it?

  There is a choice to make here: either you make a conference longer, and expect attendees to be present in a diluted way throughout it (from a “content” point of view), or you keep it short, and expect attendees to pay full attention to the official programme.

  Going Solo being an almost training-like conference — meaning that I expect attendees to get a lot out of the programmed content — I think it really makes sense to have it concentrated and short.

• 1 track: most conferences are also multi-track conferences. I had a brief conversation about this with Laurent Haug, who organizes LIFT — when I told him how happy I was that LIFT08 was going to be “one track, everybody in one room”. He told me it took them three years to take the plunge and do it. For a conference organizer, providing a single track means you take full responsibility for the programme. There’s no wriggling out by offering alternatives. If people aren’t happy, they can blame you for your choices. But honestly, I think it’s part of the job.

  One of the things that made me give up on attending panels at SXSW was the fact that there were so many competing sessions to choose from for each time slot that I just didn’t have the energy (and stress reserves) to make the decision. Conferences are already in the realm of too many choices, and going for a single track means that as the organizer, you’re taking some of the burden of choice off your attendees.

• limited audience: more people present does not necessarily mean that you get more value out of the networking or the event. With about 150 people present, Going Solo really wants to be human-sized. I was at BlogTalk 10 days ago, and really liked the feel of a conference where it is easy to interact with a large proportion of attendees present. There is less frantic networking, there are less “tourists”, the people present are more involved and the speakers are more accessible. This is the kind of atmosphere I want for Going Far events.