Open source conference design

Open reuse
First and foremost ways of designing conferences, or any real life face to face, group conversations that were not limited in their reuse in any way by copyright. So stuff is reusable, and the design principles are completely open for everyone to add to and improve. The design stuff - the design principles, and all experiential knowledge that people want to contribute from putting them into practice is share and share a like.

What features could OSCD include?
It can include working with the virtual stuff but is also about, and has a primary focus on the real life, non-virtual, non-electronic, non-technolgy stuff. There's a huge amount of stuff on using the technology for collaboration but as far as I can see very little on designing social, real life, fact to face events - so that networks of such events could begin to replicate the sort of collaboration being achieved in the virtual sphere.

What's wrong with traditional style conferences?
Plenty, mostly about missed opportunities to tap into the collective intelligence, the collective wisdom of the crowd.

Tradional style conferences are often about maintaing the status quo, business as usual. This can be reinforced through a variety of means including:


 * layout of furniture, who sits where
 * opportunites for the the 'Great and the good', to strut their same old stuff
 * opportunties for parachuted in 'experts' to out talk valuable local knowledge
 * excluding potential contributors through high prices
 * excluding people through use of jargon
 * choosing inaccessible venues
 * Community conference facilities that end up being out of the price range of the communties they are nominally there to serve

Related topics

 * Towards sustainable conferences
 * Campaigns for affordable conferences
 * Community involvement

Related wiki

 * Meta Collab - sample article: Stigmergic collaboration