maupuia calling

Webstock absolutely rocked. I had a wonderful time at the conference, and it made everything that led up to it worthwhile. Dealing with budgets and committees and egos; worrying about timelines and responsibilities - it all melted away during four magical days.
We set out to create something different. One of our taglines was, “not your average conference” - we wanted Webstock to be an experience. I guess it might be useful, at the least for me, to look back at to look at how we did that.

First off, we organised the conference as fans. We approached people to speak that we wanted to hear. We figured that if we liked them, others would too. You can’t sell a conference if you’re not passionate about who you have speaking there. You can’t fake that. We never lost that feeling of being fans. We were going to meet the people that had influenced and taught us. Or that were inspiring us on a daily basis.

I can remember so many times coming home from a meeting, or when something wasn’t going well, or when we were having to fight battles over the vision we had for Webstock, and then the next day, reading, say, a Kathy Sierra blog entry about what you need to do to inspire passion. And thinking that maybe we did have it right.

Sticking with the fan thing for moment - we had one magical night on the eve of the main conference at Kai in the City, and photos here. Sitting next to Doug Bowman, across from Russell Brown, looking down the table to Kelly Goto and Heather Hesketh. Turning around to see Joel Spolsky, Ben Goodger and Kathy Sierra. Like I’m sure others there, I had to pinch myself. Or at least drink another glass of wine.

So if you’re going to organise a conference, be a fan.

We also ran the conference to make a profit. This was perhaps the main lesson we got from Mike Pearson at GOVIS - you might be a not-for-profit organisation (as Web Standards NZ is), but you run a conference as a not-for-loss venture. At this stage I’ve no idea how much money Webstock has made. Certainly it’s not enough that we could have run it as a commercial venture. But it will give us some money to do other things, to think even bigger for the next Webstock.

A corollary of that: you have to charge people to come to the conference. So many times our instincts were non-commercial. That’s too much to charge. How can we justify that?

You know what? Price sets a value. Absolutely don’t overcharge, but don’t be scared to charge a market price for what you’re doing. Among other things, money lets you do lots of the things that carry something from good to wonderful. The treats and the extras.

Oh, and the little things seemingly carry more weight than you might expect. Among the biggest things people appreciated at the conference? Free coffee and free ice-cream.

Brand is important. Who knew? I’ve always been a tad cynical about brand and branding, but then I’m not usually involved in creating one. Have a vision, get good people to realise and absolutely pay attention to detail. It matters. I think we got consistency and quality right at Webstock.

Don’t be scared to be different, and look to surprise people. Among other things, on April 1 we served the whole conference website without stylesheets, just plain text. As a power saving measure. I think we may have lost a few registrations from Inland Revenue - an email said, “I can’t show this site to managers here, it looks uprofessional. How do we know you guys are for real?” - but I’d like to think it helped create an expectation and air around Webstock. And - and ok, I’m unrealistically proud of this idea - we had a biscuit taste-off as the finishing item on day one. Who else does that?

Oh, and finally for this entry, open each day of a conference with a song by the Clean.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 10:34 pm and is filed under webstock. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.