Camps: Rising Star of Event Formats?
Mary Hodder, of Napsterization and Dabble.com, has an interesting wrap up on MashupCamp. What’s interesting about it, to me at least, is not that it deals with mashups (which I’ve begun to dissect) but that it deals with the Camp format itself.
What is a camp? Mary’s got a nice, first-person kind of description:
Camps are in high contrast to top down conferences, where star speakers have their names and pictures splashed around the conference pages for months before the event, followed by music and theater lights to queue the audience to note the star about to speak, letting us know we should be in awe of them, and feeling distance from them. At camps, everyone has an equal chance to speak; there is no advance schedule, and no advance speaker list. The distance is much smaller and people are accessible no matter their status.The shift in feel is nice. Instead of awe for people like Lessig, there is tremendous respect. The room was quiet because people wanted to listen with care, not because we were forced to… the camp format really supports respect for speakers, experienced or less so.
Most other speakers here are not at his level in terms of career accomplishments. These hackers of mashups, discussion leaders or demo-ers are smart thoughtful accomplished people nonetheless. They need to spend their time well, and the camp conference format means they are able to suggest sessions for discussion and hacking that meet their needs well, but they can also participate in discussion with folks like Larry who are distunguished for the thoughtful consideration of, in his case, IP and digital media.
I’ve got many different points of view on this matter:
Participant - I've been in more than my share of Open Space events and I can tell you that the opportunity to learn is really tremendous. The experience brings out things that are almost never possible, even over the top-shelf liquor in the best hotel lobby.
Developer - We're actually building this sort of software. It presents a ton of challenges organizationalyl and developmentally, but now that we can see the pieces of it working together, we know we have a winner.
Advisor - We've been talking and now, even working, with a number of different conferences, tradeshows, and other types of groups that are involved in getting people together. It's examples and descriptions like this that help drive home the value.