A Fond Farewell: Five Reasons Gnomedex Will Be Missed

Attending the yearly conference circuit makes me sometimes  feel like conference organizers learned their trade by watching ranchers herd sheep. Rather like little “woolies” shuttled from pasture to pasture, each attendee is branded with the conference tag then guided to a designated corral where people cluster about in glassy-eyed clumps while the conference speakers drone on, unheard, about their heads until it’s time to break for the food trough or the after party.  It’s irritating that even the after party  inevitably involves more milling about and speeches which could be borne if it was felt that organizers actually gave  a damn about attendees.

Because of this I, for one, will miss Gnomedex. Now that Chris Pirillo has announced that after a decade, Gnomedex as a conference has come to end. As a community we are the poorer for it, since few conferences are smart enough to understand that the show is about the attendees.

Year after year Chris has put on events that not only highlighted cutting edge trends, but featured speakers you wouldn’t hear elsewhere, and did it all while erasing the perceived gap between star and attendee. As Dave Winer put it, this was the kind of show you wanted to pay for,

“At Gnomedex, the tradition (of paying to go) is so strong that even though I’ve spoken at two of the three shows I’ve been to, I’ve always paid for my ticket. It may be out of personal loyalty to Chris and Ponzi, or knowing that it’s not a big corporation putting on the show, not sure what it is but it never occurs to me to ask for a comp.”

From someone like Dave Winer, who has made his name on harsh, opinionated critique, this is high praise indeed.

In the past when colleagues have asked me about Gnomedex I found myself saying it was a conference where no business happened; almost as a way to discourage them from attending if all they wanted to do was the usual “conference thing”.  Then I would quickly add that unlike SXSW, which is a sort of Spring Break for Geeks, Gnomedex was more than simply a social event. Instead, this was a conference with a strong creative streak that always left me feeling re-energized, brimming with new ideas.  While  session topics may not have been related directly to business they provided the type of fuel that feeds the spirit, entrepreneurial or metaphysical.

I attended every Gnomedex since 2007, four in all. As a small thank you to Chris, here are my top five examples of sessions that made Gnomedex great:

1)      I Want to Drive the Mars Rover Robot

Geeks have a fascination with space, and I am no exception. When Scott Maxwell, Mars Rover Driver Team Lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, stepped on stage he had the audience in the palm of his hands. Scott playfully informed the audience that NASA simply doesn’t have enough mathematicians and that through the use of social media it hopes to engage enthusiasts who literally wanted to help  solve NASA’s problems. When he asked who wanted to help him drive the Mars Rover robot, the audience nearly raised the roof.

2)      At Derek K. Miller’s Bedside

As a society we are not good at talking about illness. Often, either consciously or not, those who are ill become sequestered by those who are because people are unsure how to talk around the elephant in the living room. Which is why when Chris Pirillo, after informing the audience that long time attendee Derek K. Miller was too ill in his fight with cancer to attend, turned to the big screen,  and transported everyone to Derek’s bedside live, it was just an amazing moment. Watching Derek interact with the audience and the audience with him was the kind of intimacy most conferences are too self-conscious or unaware of to attempt.

3)      The Calacanis and Winer Tango

Prior to attending Gnomedex I was used to audiences being overly polite to speakers, even if they feel a speaker is feeding them a load of bull. Which is why it was so refreshing to witness Dave Winer pick up on the audience sentiment and yell out at Jason Calacanis, who was simultaneously denouncing spammers on one hand and pitching his product with the other, “Jason what about conference spam, aren’t you spamming us?” (Watch below at about the 7:45 mark) This incident lead to a variety of drama online but  it was thrilling to witness the audience not just sit there passively while the speaker broke the tenant of Gnomedex “don’t pitch”.

4)      Invisible People in the Auditorium

It is easy to dismiss Mark Horvath as a hustler. Perhaps there is a little bit of him that still feels like he is still panhandling, albeit with a larger audience, and occasionally some jive slips in. It is easy to judge Mark, but I dare anyone to deny the efforts he has gone through to help the homeless find a voice. It’s a daunting task, making people sitting in cushy chairs sipping Starbucks and feeding off of wifi, think  about the plight of  the homeless, even for a moment. So, in 2009, when Mark introduced James, a homeless man who lived in Nicklesville, Seattle’s homeless “tent city” (video below of Mark’s interview with James at the camp for InvisiblePeople.tv). Mark did what he does very well which is wake up the audience and get them to re-evaluate what’s important.

5)      I Like Cyborgs with My Cultural Anthropology

There have been so many great geek moments at Gnomedex, like Nathan Wade’s Serial Cyborg project, that I was hard pressed to round out the top 5. But Amber Case’s look at prosthetic culture and cyborg anthropology was simply a lot of nerdy fun. She won me over with her  comparison between trilobites shedding their eyes to the way we shed computer screens as part of our visual input.

Fond Farewell

For my part I am as proud that ReveNews was able to provide coverage for Gnomedex 2008 as well as be a sponsor of Gnomedex 10. I am also honored that in 2009 I got a brief unforgettable 10 minutes  to discuss the impact of the Amazon Tax.

I hope that Gnomedex as a conference isn’t gone forever but morphs into something that we the audience can continue to plug into.

To Chris Pirillo (featured to the right sporting the latest in geek fashion) and the dedicated staff of Gnomedex, I say thanks for the memories.