Well, I'm back from YearlyKos. I want to thank all of you who came up to me to shake my hand with a friendly hello, and I want to thank all of you who graciously allowed me to do the same. I also want to thank everyone who came to the MetaKos panel, the Hot Topic panel, and the
Beyond Breaking! workshop on diary writing: I hope we did a good job by your eyes.
Let's face it, this was a blast. We couldn't have asked for a better first-year conference.
There have already been much-needed diaries praising the volunteers, and Gina herself, for their spectacular work, and I won't pile on too much. But now the volunteers would like to know what worked and what didn't, while it's still very fresh in everyone's mind. So please, take a minute below and give them some feedback.
Here's some of my own thoughts, in no particular order. You can use these to stimulate your own critiques; you don't have to agree with me.
Venue. People love to hate Las Vegas, primarily because it is, well, unrelentingly evil. But for conventions, it's masterfully set up. Fares are cheap; transportation to and from the airport is painless. The hotels are very large, and clustered together such that even if you can't get a room in one place you can find a room in one of the four or five adjoining hotels. And the hotels have enough restaurants, entertainment, etc., that you don't even particularly have to leave the
building for the half-week duration of the conference, if you don't want to.
I kept imagining what it would have been like to have the conference in a convention center not attached to the hotel, and I have to be honest: I think it would have sucked. For a conference of this size and theme, one of the highlights and in fact one of the primary points is being able to meet and do lunch/evening entertainment with other attendees. That's a lot harder when you can't drift off just for an hour or so, and/or when the convention hall is a taxi ride to or from wherever you personally end up staying.
What about the venue did you like? What didn't you like? Assume next year we have twice the attendees, and need twice the room -- how does that change things, for the next venue?
Panels and Workshops. In general, I was pleasantly surprised. My greatest fear of the conference was that the panels were going to be as dull as paint drying, because let's face it -- blogging is a much better method for conveying lots of information, especially for bloggers.
The panels turned out mixed, I think. On some, I wish the participants had prepared more. On some, I thought the audience questions were really not the best part of the panel, and could have been pared down in favor of more substantive discussions. Other panels were simply fascinating -- it's one thing to read someone's writing, and be impressed by it. It's something entirely different to see them in action, and see the absolute brilliance of some of the voices we've got as leading lights of the progressive blogosphere. Simply amazing.
One minor problem I had was that, on the panels I was on, it was nearly impossible to simply have back-and-forth conversations between the panelists. The linear table and microphone setup meant that it was sometimes hard to even see your fellow panelists, much less guess when it was OK to jump in on the point they were making. I don't know how to solve that, but perhaps more aggressive moderators -- an interview style, maybe -- would ironically encourage more natural conversation.
Oh, and some talks were too short. That's a fact of having so many, but I would have liked to see some of the workshops, especially, get two-hour chunks, because they really only started to get into the meat of things as the hour waned. We'll see if anyone agrees with me there. What do you think about the mix of panels and workshops and caucuses? Would you like to see more? Fewer? Would you be willing to pay additional fees for some half-day extensive sessions with particular professionals, or something like that?
Parties and Off-Site Events. I'm not kidding around here, if you missed some of these off-site events, you missed out on a lot. The Clark event, in particular, I found, well, inspiring. I'm going to try to write about it for the UnConventional e-book; I hope I can do it justice.
Some people complained about the lavishness of the Warner party. I'm not one of them. It's definitely true that we bloggers aren't used to big parties, and that we don't particularly want to get used to them, but Warner embraced our movement with both arms, and really stepped in early when many other politicians were still deciding whether to commit. He did a great job, and he threw a great celebration to honor the first year.
Next year, I expect the events to be pretty similar to these, but it does point to another important criteria for the next venues -- they, too, have to be in locations that can handle all these various offsite events. That's not trivial -- there's more that has to be rented out than simply a (massive) convention center hall, especially considering how much this thing is expected to grow.
Professionalism. The volunteers handled everything, well, perfectly. Nothing broke, or if it did, they fixed it. The media figures were nearly universally happy and relaxed, and the coverage in general showed that they were impressed by the event. The politicians and other figures were similarly happy, and it showed.
The amount that went into planning this conference was unreal. I was in on the emails; I saw the months and months of hidden problems, and near-disasters, and infuriating little details, etc. I think we have to face up to a simple fact: we have to pay the core volunteers next year. We need to make a couple of salaries part of the YK expenses, and be done with it.
Vendors and Exhibitors. Again, nicely done here by my book. The hall was well-staffed and representative of a wide range of interests. I'd like to hear from the exhibitors themselves how they thought the weekend went; the several I talked to were quite pleased with the results. I think next year there's probably going to be a larger presence by more exhibitors, and I think that's going to be a very good thing.
A clear win in my book for Best Promotion: the Teamsters were handing out USB flash drives with Teamster info on them. Gotta say, that tops the list of damn brilliant ideas -- handing out USB flash drives at a conference of bloggers? It makes so much sense it made my nose twitch to admit that it actually surprised me. I was using mine by that same evening, and I plan to keep using it wherever I go.
So whoever came up with that -- you win. Sheer brilliance.
Conveying Last-Minute Information. One minor point of grief that I had was that it was nearly impossible to find out what was going on at any one point in time. There were several press conferences -- the Reid one, for example, that I'd have loved to go to, but I had no earthly idea of when they were or where they were being held. Others I happened in on through sheer luck. We need a better method of conveying that information next time. Or maybe I was just personally too scattered to figure it out. I was very scattered, most days.
Blogging. All right, I admit it. I didn't blog about blogging when attending the bloggers' conference about blogging. It would have caused MetaJesus to cry. But there was a WiFi network set up by the volunteers, and it seemed to work great. Watching a sea of computers liveblog the Plame panel, for example -- I estimated there were about fifty laptops, and the soft clicking of keys could be heard in every quiet interval -- was very, very strange. You won't see that very often.
But one of my biggest goals of the event was to interact with you all offline, and in that I was able to do that, I'm pretty damn happy. I didn't get to meet everyone I wanted to, or even see everyone I wanted to, and I would have loved to have an entire day to hang out with a few key people who's brains I'd have dearly loved to probe, but I was pretty damn pleased.
So that's my list. Now, what's your own feedback? What things do you think went especially well, and what things weren't you happy with?
Let the volunteers know in the thread below, so the planning can begin in earnest for YearlyKos '07.
(Oh, and I'll be announcing how you can pre-order a copy of the UnConventional e-book, about YearlyKos 2006, in a diary tomorrow. Look for it -- I got a chance to see many of the photos, and they're amazing.)