Settling Dust and Many Thanks

I manage to leave every major event technologically crippled in some way.  After Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, I lost my entire laptop; this conference, I only lost my power supply, which was easily enough replaced, and I’m now back online.  I’m convinced that losing something is my way of physically manifesting what running an event takes out of you.  It’s probably also my way of enforcing a short vacation right after each show.  Hey, it works. 

It was an amazing week, with so many highlights: Tim’s moving opener, Clay Shirky’s cutting perspective on media and participation, Dan Lyons' side-splitting romp.  It was also an amazing effort by many talented and wonderful people.  I’d like to take a moment to recognize some of them.

The O’Reilly and TechWeb event teams. We’ll start with the fact that these guys worked their butts off.  Imagine all the work that goes into registering, managing, feeding, and servicing 10,000 attendees, 200 speakers, and 150 exhibitors.  Now imagine doing it twice in two weeks.  Back when I started working on events (in the Stone Age, otherwise known as the early nineties) teams worked on a handful of events over the course of the year, and you only ever did one really big one. Not so now. The O’Reilly team had MySQL the week immediately before Web 2.0, and the TechWeb team went straight from Moscone to Las Vegas for Interop (only a couple of us, including myself, obviously, are spared that marathon.)  It’s not just an enormous amount of work, it’s an emotional investment, being available and helpful on that scale for that long.  I bow down to the pros who are able to do this.  You are gods and goddesses in my book.

The other thing to understand about these two stellar teams is that Web 2.0 Expo breaks all their normal processes.  It is perfectly fitting that a large scale Web 2.0 event would be the result of an intense collaboration, as this effort is.  But in a partnership, every plan is a negotiation between at least two different ways of doing things, with a large margin thrown in for the rapidly changing times and attendee expectations. The teams’ tolerance for reinventing the wheel, and every flavor of wheel, every step of the way, was saintly. It’s also a big part of what made the event a success.  Neither organization could have built this event to this scale alone. The strategic decision to mix up the DNAs of the two organizations in order to build something unique was a smart one, but it falls to the teams to actually go the extra mile, explain what might seem obvious, listen actively when it seems there is no time to listen, and generally make this work.   

So, to Meghan Reilly, Vee McMillen, Crystal Lucas, Patrick Dirden, Shirley Bailes, Allison Iacopini, Matthew Balthazor, Whitney Michael, Anna Ashbeck, Karie Hubbell, Mark Levitt, Natalia Wodecki, Maureen Jennings, Susan Young, Ayrien Machiren, Natalia Dugandzic, Paige Finkelman, Donna Ortiz, Elyse Gottlieb, Janetti Chon, Jason Quesada, Joylyn Tanner, Sara McGinness, Suzanne Axtell, Stacy O'Connell , Laurie Fellezs, Liliana Arancibia, Cindee Stott, Amy Jones, Marco Pardi, Carl Smith, Andrea Mauerman, Jon Osing, Vicki Sanders, and the others I have neglected to mention, thank you for a wonderful event.  And to Gina Blaber, my partner in crime and finisher of my sentences: your trust and friendship would be worth all this even if we didn't have a killer conference at the end!  It is an honor to work with you all.

More shout outs!

Blaine Cook.  If you enjoyed the South Park Crawl on Wednesday night, the person you have to thank for that (in addition to the half dozen TechWeb staff who organized it) is Blaine, who spawned the idea at an advisory board meeting we held back in October.  A vast improvement over the standard convention center party, and I heard lots of great feedback.  Further shout outs to all the sponsors: Adaptive Path (who were the first on board, thank you!), Citizen Space, Early Stage Venture Capital Association, IBM, Federated Media, Leverage Software, Rearden, Six Apart (loved the golfing!), Wired, Yahoo! Brickhouse, and Zoom Prospector. 

Speakers.  I gave myself a healthy reminder of the stress our speakers experience by giving a talk at Ignite last week.  That was 5 minutes; many of our speakers have 50 minute, and even three hour slots.  It’s no small task preparing to speak, especially in front of large audiences.  I think all of our speakers deserve a big hand, but I’m going to call out a few with whom I’m particularly impressed in a post later today.  In the meantime, thanks to everyone who put themselves out there last week.  Nice work.

The Advisory Board.  For reviewing proposals, suggesting speakers, getting the word out, and letting us know when we were headed in the wrong direction, thank you to all the advisory board members.

Moscone and the City of San Francisco.  When we bought our coach-class ticket on the Green train this year (hopefully upgrading to first class next year) we were delighted to find that the City of San Francisco had already been thinking about these issues when they built Moscone West.  Makes you proud. 

Sarah Milstein and Tony Stubblebine.  Sarah and Tony took the Web2Open concept and made it their own.  This year, schedules meshed between the Open and the main conference, hybrid sessions cross pollinated between the two programs, and the Open hosted its share of web celebs.  During all this, the dynamic duo was also hosting and managing CrowdVine for us.  Great job!  Thanks also to last year’s hosts for pioneering this concept: Chris Messina and Tara Hunt deserve a ton of credit for getting Web2Open off the ground.

Ted Shelton, Chris Heuer, and rest of The Conversation Group.  Blogtropol.us was a wonderful addition to the event this year, and we look forward to working with these talented, thoughtful and energetic folks again at future Web 2.0 Expos. 

Fritz Nelson and Matt Conner.  Their awesome video work brought the passion and quirks of the community to the big screen each day.  Who else would have thought to video the crazy balloon guy?  You guys are geniuses.

Janetti Chon, John Battelle and our Launch Padders.  Janetti joined the team during our time of greatest chaos, and managed in her charming, unassuming, and thoroughly organized way to herd the cats and make Launch Pad a huge success.  You’ll be hearing a lot more from Janetti in the coming months as she moves into her role as content and community manager, and I’m confident you’ll be as charmed as everyone else who’s had the pleasure of meeting her.  Thanks also to my co-chair Brady Forrest for helping in the judging process, and to John Battelle for being the consummate host once again.   Also, nice work, Zachery and the Triggit team!

ShowNets, our network vendor. Okay, so the network wasn’t perfect.  But it was up, mostly, and when there were problems, Vee and Anna on the O’Reilly team were there with the team from ShowNets working on solving them.  We’re moving toward every connection attempt being successful, and while we’re not there yet, this was a giant step forward. 

Brady and Dave.  My inspired, inspiring co-chairs.  Well, obviously, I think we did a pretty good job.  Working with you two is my great reward.

Let's do it all again in New York!

Comments

[dave mcclure]

Jen: same for me... you rock the house, and it's always a pleasure!

congrats to the rest of the team for helping deliver a terrific event. i had a blast :)

[JudyNV]

Your 3 links "Tim’s moving opener, Clay Shirky’s cutting perspective on media and participation, Dan Lyons' side-splitting romp." don't work. They all point to Matt Mullenweg's presentation on his WordPress.

It is interesting that the MySQL event has MANY presentations posted but Web 2.0 Expo has only 20 links out of over 140 presentations. Are you sure both of these events were sponsored by the same organization? Why did one event service their attendees so much better than the other?

10,000 people attended Web 2.0 Expo? By whose count? I would have guessed more like 4,000.

[Ted Shelton]

thank you for the kind "shout out" -- the whole team at The Conversation Group enjoyed working with your team and supporting the conference. We are looking forward to working with you on future events

[Janetti Chon]

Hi JudyNV - I made sure the links are directing to the proper links. We've also got over 60 of our speaker presentations on the www.web2expo.com/sf site as well as videos of all our keynotes and the launch pad program.

I hope you can find what you need and if not, please check back as we post speaker presentations as we receive them. And some speakers choose not to share their presentation.

Thanks,
~ Janetti