Who Were You At ETech?

One of the more interesting observations at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology 2007 Conference was in one of the areas of social attration – fom about halfway through the first day, people started exchanging name badges. This lead to such humourous situations as a first time attendee waiting patiently to talk to Jeff Bezos (Amazon) only to find out that it wasn’t Bezos he was talking to. Or someone being amazed that Western parents would call their child Anil, and he’s incredibly proud of it (while the long term Etech attendees watched and bit their tounges as Cal Henderson attempted to not give the game away by laughing…).

All jolly japes and great fun? Well in part, yes. After all, I did take part after a fashion, by socially engineering a new badge to be so ludicrously over the top… ‘Cthulhu Mythos, from Arkham Asylum.’ The ad-hoc rules of the game seem to be that you walked up to someone, chatted, and then if you liked whatever you heard, you reached for their badge and did the exchange. More than once I stepped back, declaring my card to be ‘mine, and I’m not exchanging my silver bullet.’ (which had the knock on effect of people coming over to me because they had been told they just needed to see ‘who I was’). But given that roughly two thirds of the attendees (NB this is going on previous years, I don’t have 2007 numbers to hand) are attending their first ETech, this must have been a huge mind frak for them.

In our world of IRC, IM, SMS, (strangly, there wasn’t a rush of Twittering at Etech such as there was at SXSW), blogs, RSS, aggregators and so on, everyone’s association is with a textual name – not with a face. If you weren’t part of the in crowd that knew each other across the room, then how were you meant to do anything worthwhile? When the reporter who was covering the event for ‘Wired‘ remarked that she felt like one of the Cool Kids because someone had decided her badge was worthy of being swapped, the images of a Tech Elite sharing ideas and inspiration started to look a little less ‘open source community’ and more like a really smart frat house in an American College.

The O’Reilly events have always had an air of being cliquey – and lets be fair, pretty much any conference in any discipline will have the same closed feel. The strength of Etech has always resided less in the presentations, but in the personal connections that are made. Without Etech I would not have been so heavily involved in the initial steps of The Podcast Network for example. The continued fresh faces in San Diego is what draws me back every year, but I’m not sure if those fresh faces from this year will have felt sufficiently involved to be ready to put down close to $2,000 in tickets, hotels, travel, and spending money to return in 2008.

Lots of people in the last days of SXSW commented they couldn’t wait to return next year. I didn’t hear the same noises for Etech, and that more than anything, leads me to think that Tim O’Reilly and his team needs to have a strong and honest SWOT analysis of Etech with input from outside of O’Reilly Media, inc. The programme felt very much like an ETech by numbers. We have the opening remarks from Rael Dornfest, Tim’s vision followed by a quirky speaker to get us thinking. Kathy Sierra is prominently programmed, there’s a visionary talk from the BBC, Cory Doctorow’s commenting on the latest technology, we’ve a MakeFest on the Wednesday evening, Danah Boyd’s running Werewolf into the small hours after commenting on the latest social networks, and so on. That’s not to put the hard work that every presenter and exhibitor puts into Etech. Neither is it to put their speciality down. Far from it, they’re all relevant to today’s electronic world, but are they the only people working on these areas? Is there nobody else who can talk about these, and perhaps shine a light on the same topics but from another angle? Can’t we hear from them?

If I didn’t already know that the official conference reservation for ETech 2008 has been made, I would seriously suggest that ‘resting speakers for a year’ isn’t enough. They should do a Glastonbury, take a year off, cancel the Marriott booking, and return with a bang in 2009.