Apologies for being offline for the past three days. My purse (including my laptop) went missing at the Berlin Night party, which was a bit of a downer ending to an otherwise really fabulous evening. I’m borrowing time on line from others between sessions, and trying as best I can to keep up with the buzz and the zeitgeist. Mostly I am hearing reports from others in the hallway, either their own impressions or their reports of what’s being blogged in various communities.

One thing that’s come up an enormous amount is the venue. How could we have chosen such a place? The thing is that we wanted to start Web 2.0 Expo in Europe in Berlin. It’s beautiful, affordable, easy to get to from most of Europe, it has a great vibe to it, and there weren’t any other major web events here. But the Messe is the only venue in Berlin that we’re aware of that will fit this event. We did an extensive venue search, and thought we had seen all the options. There are venues that can fit the keynotes, but have no breakout session rooms. Some have good space for the expo hall, but no keynote room. And so it goes. If anyone knows of a venue they think we should consider, we will eagerly explore it. But we (not me personally, but Meghan and several others on our staff) have toured 5 or 6 different possible venues (with the help of the amazingly wonderful folks at BerlinPartner) and unfortunately none have met our specs. I’d be thrilled to hear that we are missing something here and in fact find there is a better space for us in Berlin.

Especially because we would like to come back here. Brady and I asked for a show of hands in the keynote yesterday for which cities the crowd would most like to go to, and I’m a bit afraid that the Berlin option sounded like an afterthought (it wasn’t), but we’ve talked about rotating the event among two or three different cities from the beginning. I’d love to see the conference hop from Barcelona to Prague (for example) and then end up back in Berlin, maybe keeping that rotation, depending on how things go. One thing we know from years of doing events is that you have to see how the community reacts and respond to the feedback. With bigger events (and yes, the point of Expo is to be very inclusive, and often therefore large) planning very far out is both necessary (to secure venues, primarily) and quite limiting. We each do produce events that are smaller, very focused, and can be a bit more agile. We try hard to keep our options open so that we can move with the community, but the process of building an event community is iterative, and the iterations are pretty far apart.

The feedback about the Messe is overall negative, and this is not entirely unexpected. In my first post on this blog I stressed a bit about it:

a reminder that while the community is very exciting, the venue is a bit of a challenge.

I really regret not having made more of an effort to liven up the space, and we hear the message loud and clear that this has affected the vibe. I will say though that despite the rather dreary hallways, they are full of an amazing group of people, who are indeed quite lively, engaging, creative, and intelligent. In that regard, the event to me is quite a success.