Time to change my conference blogging behavior. I’d been trying to take live notes the first day of Supernova. I ended up with cryptic one-liners. Rapid but not worth much.
I started posting notes from training conferences back when few of us had blogs. Now everybody has blogs. The some of the conference bloggers are great. Here’s Liz Lawley’s take on Clay Shirky’s opening presentation:
Clay starts by showing a photo of a Shinto shrine that has been rebuilt exactly many times over 1300 years. UNESCO won’t certify it as a 1300-year-old building–because it has been rebuilt over and over again. This is an example of them prioritizing “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process.”
He then compares it to a conversation fifteen years ago with AT&T, trying to convince them that Perl was an appropriate tool for development. When asked where the support came from, he responded that “we get our support from a community”–which to them sounded a bit like “we get our Thursdays from a banana.”
Money quote on this from Clay: “They didn’t care that it didn’t work in practice, because they’d already decided it didn’t work in theory.”
Perl, he says, is a Shinto shrine. It exists because people love it and care for it.
Best line of the day: Our tools turn love into a renewable building material.
Best predictor of longevity for anything: do the people who like it take care of it?
Linux gets rebuilt every night, by people who don’t want it to wither away.
Until recently, the radius and half-life of our affection has been limited. In the past, little things could be done with love, but big things required money. Now, big things can be done with love.
Later in the discussion, Clay says the communication process (Delphi, etc) is a kind of a mcguffin. The bringing people together and getting them to talk to each other is the important piece. Denise argues that “the process needs to come to a conclusion that gives the decision maker what they need to make a decision” (and that they resolve conflict).
And here’s a piece by David Weinberger that references a number of other posts about a session with Doc and Jerry.
Liz Lawley gave a great finale take on Supernova. “Liz: If we don’t delight people, we’ve failed. It’s not context or content. Google delight, and the companies that fail to delight consistently end up in trouble. The experience matters. The way that people feel matters. No one knows this better than someone who sits in a room of 17 year olds every day. If I don’t send a message in a way that makes them experience the information then I’m a failure. And the same is true here. If you don’t experience this conference, and feel engaged, and spoken to, then it’s been a failure. We need to think a lot more about the experience, the delight, the fact that we don’t live in a field of dreams world – if you build it they won’t come, they will go elsewhere where there is more delight. We have choices, and we need to build what delights.”
David Weinberger’s offering provocative views of the future. It’s electricity deja vu or electricity+services, which we’ve never seen before.
I may need to refresh my concept of amygdala learning: emotion comes first.
Supernova had a conversation hub for central posting. Also, there are 1200 conference photos up at Flickr.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
“emotion comes first” – hasn’t it always been that way?
I think of soldiers going off to war or even the whole advertising industry; it’s all about emotions. We’re not too far removed from our ancestors in trees, are we?
Jay – Supernova sounds like they tried many of the things being discussed at: Better Conferences. I’d love to get your take on what worked or didn’t work.
I also have this feeling that we are missing a lot of experience in how to make conferences better. Lots of people have tried lots of things. Must be a way to leverage some of that.