Not that I'm pissed off when event organizers miss the obvious but... yes, I am... really do they still need feedback for this?

Let me think... hmm...

Here is the thing: as long as they are affected by geekism, yes they do. But I can't explain a diagnosis and be pissed off at the same time so I will start by ranting.

Any event, or forum, or symposium, or whatever activity that involves people, is either connection-centered or forgotten. Or it helps to improve society or is just stuff.

Which is not enough even if it's good stuff.

Of course it can always be worst. It can be propaganda, which will be perceived as totally normal for close followers but not for the rest. Which means that there is a whole world out there that can't swallow that. Propaganda will always be way harder to defend in face of outsiders and will probably scare newcomers.

In the other side of things you can use whatever good stuff was selected (by you or your committee), to inspire and connect people. That's exactly when things start to get interesting. But you can't do that unless you stop focusing on content and start using it as the vehicle. That is using the content as your excuse to create the right context.

Caution: by no means will this justify a poor content. Quite on the contrary, this method counts with you making an excellent selection of it.

The thing is that today there is no point in going to a meeting if you can't connect with people that matters. It will be a shallow experience and feel empty in the end.

I say this not to add criticism on events that fail at connecting but to put some light on it. If you show things that matters to people but you don't consider the conversations they may provoke, then those may never find a proper context to prosper. They never will become an asset because you didn't give them a chance to expand.

Lets say for a minute that you don't consider conversations as an asset of the event and I'm your audience. Where is the value for me? What's my part on what you do? To passively attend? To hear some tie behind a podium-like kind of thing? Attend a lecture to "make me think"?

Lets take that last one: thinking is about the brain isn't it? Well, guess what... that's not how the brain likes to work (I promise references on that in another post).

So if conversations can't expand they don't spread and I promise you they will unequivocally gravitate to invisibility.

The funny thing is that this is orthogonal, not only to the content but also to the level of specialization. It can easily happen with physicians, psychologists, physicists... choose the one you like... neuroscientists, writers, artists or tech guys. Any specialized enough guy can easily be exposed to event organizers that didn't get rid (or are aware) of this problem. To understand why this happens and how to get rid of it you need to know how geekism works and how to deal with it, but I also have to leave that for another post.

By the way... if you take The Conversation as the sum of all of the conversations emerging from the event's key points, then you will be better guided on what to be doing and what to evade doing. And you'll be better at using stuff to connect people for the better.

I think that breaking the ice on subjects and helping others to do so is still very underestimated. If you have that skill, know you have an asset and your presence becomes valuable regardless of the theme or the geekness level.