It is extraordinarily difficult, impossible even, to give 10,000 people a consistently good experience at any conference.
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It is extraordinarily difficult, impossible even, to give 10,000 people a consistently good experience at any conference.
First are foremost, you’re immediately managing the logistics of a small town of people who all need to sit, move, eat, drink, pee, be informed / entertained, be kept safe, be corporeal, and be in community with each other for the duration. That’s a huge project on it's own.
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Andy McMillanreplied to Andy McMillan on last edited by
The venues that hold events of that size are also a notoriously bad time, and have to compromise a lot to accommodate so many people (see: terrible food, gross bathrooms, long lines)
Also truly, what is the benefit of producing a conference at that scale?
If it’s about disseminating information, honestly that’s rarely best done as a live talk, you’ll do so more effectively by filming something and releasing it online (see: Apple’s trajectory with WWDC, or what we did with Duolingo Duocon).
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Andy McMillanreplied to Andy McMillan on last edited by
If it’s about creating community, then how are you doing that with a music festival amount of people but inside a communicable disease echo chamber built in the 60s? Your only choice is to break everyone up into more manageable groups, which multiplies logistical complexity by an order of magnitude, and also leads to everyone feeling like they missed out on what everyone else experienced.