One of the things that became apparent during the past few weeks, is how conference panels can have all sorts of new structures, attutudes and interaction. I've read reports on both the BloggerCon and Foo Camp scenes and I'm now at a conference called DigitalID World.
So a strange thing happened yesterday - during our "Grass Roots: Does it have a chance" panel. Maybe it was because AKMA was moderating and me, Doc, Simon Phipps from Sun and Simon Grice from Midentity immediately sent out av vibe of "Hey we're here to talk about humans, not corporations."
So here we all are - sitting there - facing the crowd. After each of us gave our opening spiel, we launched off on a thread on "customers vs consumers", why end-users wanna "control their profiles" and the always fun "what is social software" themes. Thank god we didn't go too deep into "what is MyIdentity?"
Then all of a sudden, folks starting piping up from the audience - putting their own 2 cents in. It was beautiful - free of any concern of "upsetting the order of things", we jumped back and forth between open mike Q&A and this sort of hybrid call and response mode between the Reverand AKMA, the panelists and the audience - which had quickly become an instrinsic part of the panel.
Perhaps it was because the topic under discussion was "end-users utilzing their identities in a world which thinks they own these profiles" that things got so real - but it was clear LOTS of folks had something to say. Doc got his message across, Simon Phipps gave us that "well funded Sun guy who gets to fly around the world talking standards" approach and me - well I admit it - I used profanity and pleaded for the rights of the humans.
But I also got to meet Simon Grice - who has a cool company called Midentity and it was Simon that we choose to have give the only pre-canned presentation. In Simon's pitch, he showed how identity and brands are really the same thing and how folks will be willing to pay to maintain and control their identity - just as long as it provides a coolio experience. That's why most folks don't see where the "business model" is in all this social software stuff. They just don't understand that it's the end-user's experience that counts - nothing else - and if you can innovate, liberate or enlighten that end-user - then you're good as gold.
That's why Jonathan Abrams is so lucky. He's stumbled upon an incredible experience that's really fun to interact with.
So here we are in Denver and someone puts up a "BoF" notice for the Grass Roots theme. Only problem is that it's called for at 8 PM - which is during the awards dinner. So AKMA posts this message, and away we go....... [NOTE: see yah at 8:30-9 after dinner.....]
The gentle balance between anarchy, controlled restraint and organized interaction can result in truely benefical discourse and debate. If someone has something to say - they should be able to contribute to the discussion and say it. This is what happened in Boston, Sebastapol and during our panel in Denver - yesterday.
This is a completely different way of running panels - compared to how traditional conferences are run. This new way of running panels leads to improved insights, sussed out brainstorming and/or greater grokkness.
This is another link in the communication chain, which currently is rendered as IRC channels, Wikis or blog aggregators. Standing in line to ask a question at the microphone can be mimiced in software, but it's oh so real in meatspace. Blending the boundary between hard-edged explicit digital cyberpspace and the soft-edged analog world of meatspace.
So maybe that's what Dave Winer was talking about today. A win-win scenario where new kinds of interaction and trust can move us forward.
These new kinds of panels, whether virtual on an IRC channel, via direct comment threads or in a meatspace location - means we can keep the conversation going - round the world 24/7/365.
We're now at Cory's DRM panel and the Microsoft guy is trying to convince Cory (and the rest of us) that Microsoft's DRM scenario is.....
