I wish I could go to this. Tons of really good speakers. But $700 worth? I don’t know. Of course, this includes “unlimited networking,” and I don’t think they are talking about WiFi.
Is it at all ironic that a conference on decentralized and networked government is in-person, expensive, and in New York City?
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I actually went to this last year – they have a (not publicised) educational discount. I think I paid $300? Can’t quite remember. The conference was pretty interesting but fairly different to what I’d imagined. I only met ONE other academic – other than danah boyd who gave a ten minute talk – so definitely not an academic conference. And neither was it a fancy industry conference with swag, as I’d sort of hoped, given it was sponsored by Google and cost $700 for a one-day conference. It was held at a university, so not a fancy location at all, the swag was limited to white paper bags with a Google sticker on them and jelly beans in the Google logo colours, and – well that was about it. Oh, the lunch was hugely disappointing – brown paper bags with sandwiches and you could help yourself to coffee and potato chips in a sort of mingling room.
On the other hand, I got to hear the web managers of all the presidential campaigns discuss things, which was fun, I saw famous people I didn’t dare to talk to, and danah boyd’s ten minute talk was great. And I really enjoyed the unconference the day after the real conference – only $35 and lots of interesting people and conversations. Oh, and mimosas for breakfast :)
I guess I blogged some of it in my archives for May 2007 – scroll past the wedding stuff to May 19 and the few days just before…
Hi, Jill. Thanks for the report: good and bad! I had great plans for being able to go to everything in the city–this one is walking distance from my apartment–but then it gets to be summer and I run out of money. Maybe I can see if I can get my school to do it next year… or just try to sneak in :). Don’t see an unconference planned for this year, unfortunately.