I have received a Facebook
invitation to register for a conference. So far so good but there is no
programme as yet, just a request to tell the organiser what subjects would be
of interest.
This is crowd sourcing at its
worst.
I don’t know whether there will be
any content that will make it worth giving up a weekend for. It may turn out to
be just a couple of days of social chat because the organiser seems to have no
ideas and no understanding of the interests of potential attendees.
Yet crowd sourcing is supposed to
be a big thing. In reality, it has been around for a while but it used to be
called research. An organiser would commission a research team to contact
potential attendees and talk to them in order to define the hot topics. The
results were used to draw up the programme.
That approach works. Throwing the
whole thing open to the world through a website won’t, because the vast
majority of potential attendees probably won’t bother to reply leaving the organiser
short of ideas.
Consulting the potential attendees
is very important but just asking ‘what do you want?’ through a Facebook page doesn’t
count as consulting.
Originally published in Conference News
