Making conferences more interesting

I recently attended Six Apart's Blogs in Action conference which I found jolly interesting. Not everyone would agree, which is hardly surprising since there were a hundred people in the room with differing degrees of prior knowledge.

After reading through Johnnie Moore's remarks and all the comments that followed, I added my own here where you can read it in context. If you don't care about context, here's what I said:

Self-organising gatherings which depend on serendipity (which is what the alternative sounds like) aren't particularly helpful, although I'm sure they're good fun.

When you have a disparate audience, as we did at the Polish Club, they all need to be brought to a similar understanding. This is bound to be perfect for only one person in the room. Others will be bored yet some will still flounder.

Q&A's can work well, but the questioner and the responder should bear in mind the needs of the wider audience.

How about getting the questioner to announce their topic and the moderator to ask "Who's interested?" A show of less than half (or two thirds) of the audience and Q&A time could be made brief and relevant. It would kill the 'show-off questioner' dead.

Fewer presentations is probably the only other thing that could have improved the use of time at the Polish Club.

I thought the ten-minute time slots for presentations was fine. Perhaps "ten minutes maximum and you're not allowed to talk fast" would be a good instruction for the speakers.

Then we could collar the speakers and ask our more obscure questions during drinks. Or, maybe better, email them afterwards.

Comments welcome, of course.