Meeting Cool People
January 17, 2007
The best thing about conferences, as I have said, is meeting cool people. I was walking back into the Speed Geeking room after my previous post about Beansec, and I almost ran into a woman. I looked down at her name tag, and it said Anne.
Of course, from this post, I knew that Anne Zelenka from Anne 2.0 was going to be here, so I stopped her and asked. And, after that moment of awkward “not-really-a-celebrity-recognition” thing that most non-celebrities who get recognized by total strangers have, it turned out that it was Anne.
And, of course, I that uncomfortable post-introduction moment of “okay, now what do I say?” Even though I’ve become quite good at networking over the years, I still carry around some of that “high-school geek discomfort” that creeps up most often when I meet someone whose work I admire.
And I have to admit, Anne’s one of my favorite bloggers – her post about her 2007 goals is one of the best posts I have read in the past little while. I happened to read it while I was coming up with my own 2007 goals, and it inspired some different thinking – her goals have a “realness” that I find all-too-often lacking in my own… while she’s clearly trying to change the world, she’s doing it while watching her son play the Canadian national anthem on trumpet. I often find my own sounding far too much like something Tony Robbins would write, and loved the humanity in what she wrote.
That post was my first exposure to her writing, and I have since really enjoyed her writing over at Web Worker Daily.
Anne’s also covering Mashup Camp for GigaOM – check out her coverage here.
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The Un-Conference Principles
January 17, 2007
As the speaker just said, the principles of these “un-conferences” are a great thought on living your life (or running your business, or…) For those who haven’t been at one of these conferences before, they’re incredibly informal and they run on these four rules:
1. Whoever comes are the right people.
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. When it’s over, it’s over.
And, The Law of Two Feet:
If at any time you find yourself in any situation where you are neither learning nor contributing – use you two feet and move to some place more to you liking.
These are also known as the Open Space principles. According to one of the speakers here, the rules came from the idea of “making the entire conference more like the coffee breaks”.
What I find interesting about that is that I always believe that the most important learning and accomplishments at any conference I have ever been at has happened outside the conference sessions. Whether it’s RSA or Blackhat, I always get a lot more out of what happens at the parties and get-togethers in the evening than I have in the sessions.
I think that I’d even postulate it as a general rule – the connections you build at a conference is far more interesting and long-lasting than whatever you learned in the conference session.