Attend or organize BIL 2010? Leave your thoughts on how we can improve it for next year. What was done right, what could be better, and what should be try to do next year? Leave your name after your comments and group them for easy browsing.

Speaker Organization

There seemed to be three issues this year - there was no predictable schedule, some less interesting speakers made it onstage while more interesting ones couldn't, and there was no mechanism for speakers to sign up the day of.

The workflow I see for next year is:

- Recruit speakers all year

- A few months before BIL, post an open invitation for speakers. Include a list of speakers who have already committed to speaking.

- A few weeks after that, post the current speaker list. Also open registration on this day for attendees.

- A few weeks after that, open up "liking" of the speakers. Only registered attendees that have donated at least $10 or $20 can vote. Like this year, we'll have free tickets and multiple levels of paid tickets, and a donation box for any amount.

- A few weeks after that, end voting. The top ranked speakers will make it on the main stage, with an order to be determined by the organizing committee. We'll group talks by interest and availability.

- The day of, have an open room with a whiteboard/paper schedule for people to sign up for talks. 

Bill Erickson

A lot of that can be done with more space. This year we had a main stage, but no "secondary stage" for day-of speakers. The secondary room was used for alternative purposes, JIL. The only other space, was the outdoor garden, but it wasn't used as a schedule speaking area very well. We had signups on the m.bilconference.com site, but it wasn't used like we wanted.

I sat behind a desk both days and managed the schedule by hand, as well as helped do the speaker wrangling. Perhaps if we had used paper on a grid (re. BIL2008) I could manually keep track of things on the digital side. So long as all of that was done in the same place.

Cody Marx Bailey 

Venue

Our venue worked well this year, so we should keep using it. BUT, I'd love to see more BILs organized around the world on the same day. Instead of individual BIL's (like BIL:Paris) working hard to promote itself, it can work off of all the other BIL's (and TED's) promotion. When people hear of TED, they want to go and look online for more info. They find out about BIL and then want to go to that. Then they see a list of BILs happening around the world and go to the one nearest them.

I see three different types of BILs:

- The full-on conferences. Could be one or multi-day, would film/livestream some of the talks, and aim for a couple hundred attendees. 

- The mini conference. This might be an afternoon gathering. It would probably be 5 20min talks followed by a few hours of mixer/conversations.

- The viewing party. This could be either one room viewing the main BIL feed (from Long Beach), or multiple rooms viewing the talks from the big BILs around the world.

Bill Erickson