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Easy come, easy go
By jpenston | April 27, 2007 |
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The problem with getting something for nothing is that you don’t see the value. That was my conclusion after the IIR ISP Forum that finished yesterday. Well, one of my conclusions anyway, but you will have to wait for another day for what was said about Joost, IPTV, Naked DSL, LLU and Fixed-to-Mobile Convergence.
The event was spread over 3 days. There were 28 speakers from 10 countries. Each was given free entry to the conference and each was allowed a free delegate’s pass. The room was set up for 60 people, but at the end of day 1 I had the distinct impression that Patrizio Sciacchitano from Telecom Italia was presenting just to me. I looked around and understood why - there were 10 people who had bothered to stick around to hear what he had to say. The poor bloke had flown in specially and had to run off straight afterwards to catch his plane home. He had flown from Italy to London and generated 1,213 pounds of CO2 emissions to speak to 10 people.
But here was the problem, just as Patrizio had to leave after he had spoken, so did just about everyone else. I can understand Patrizio doing it as he was last on and it was 5.30pm and he wanted to get home to his wife in Rome, but everyone was doing it. Less than 5 of the speakers spent more than a few hours at the conference listening to others presentations. I have to ask: which is more important, other people listening to what you have to say, or you listening to what they say? Which are you going to learn more from? Listening or speaking…?
The peak was between morning coffee and afternoon tea on day 1. By 11am, those that had been delayed getting there had arrived (people like me: I was 2 hours late thanks to a mind-numbingly stupid decision to try a new route into Olympia) and before Mikko Hypponnen’s barnstormer before tea, all was well. It must have been something Mikko said because it seemed that more than half the audience left, never to return. By day 2 it was getting a bit silly, the morning was well attended, but someone suggested that there must have been a lot of consultants in the audience because we are well known for our long lunches…
What was happening was that folks would roll up (maybe) an hour before their slot and rush off as soon as they were done. One chap who will remain nameless was out of the door before the next speaker had even been introduced. Maybe I’m picking on him unfairly as he was not the only one but he’d flown for 8 hours to be there and seemed to have brought a delegate’s guest with him - I sincerely hope he had other business in London this week or his trip and that of his colleague was one of the all time biggest wastes of time, money and carbon that I have ever seen. It’s not that his presentation was bad, it wasn’t, but I wonder what he got out of saying the same thing as he’d undoubtedly said many times before.
Maybe he was pissed off because there were so few people there listening to what he’d said… because all the other speakers had similarly legged it at the first opportunity. There was a vicious circle taking shape.
Speakers are a necessary evil at any conference. Imagine holding one without any and you’ll see my point. What you can get out of attending is actually priceless, if you can be bothered. You’ll hear all about how your peers and your competitors are seeing the market and building their products and networks. You’ll hear about new technical standards that are evolving and how to overcome some of the major hurdles in your path like regulation or the lack of it. If you can be bothered.
It sounds like I’m blaming the speakers, which in a way I am, but it was also a problem of the conference organisation. Not the logistics, the tea / coffee or the lunch which were all excellent, perhaps the pilars in the conference room cut the room into 3 distinct zones didn’t help. The quality of the presentations was generally high so this was also not one of the main problems (these were regulars on the speaker circuit, so they know what they are doing and do it well).
The lineup was good therefore, but there were questions about the agenda. Some held the view that were were being shoe-horned into following the IPTV path: in my view you can agree or disagree that video is the most important issue for ISPs today - if your company is selling outsourced email services you might disagree. No, for me the problem was that the agenda was entirely horizontal in that it was looking at one element of the distribution chain (the access networks and products). It would have been much better to have had a more vertical outlook.
A vertical outlook would have involved content owners like the BBC and Sony, and distributors like YouTube, LoveFilm and Joost. Software is also a vital element so participation from Adobe and the like would also have helped too as would a contribution from new technology vendors like CacheLogic. Get a few users in the room too and we might actually solve some problems.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain… it was called the “ISP Forum”, so maybe that is what we should expect, but it did strike me that there were may fewer ISPs than there were a few years ago. Is there even such a thing as an ISP any more?
Because the attendees were all in the same space, they sort of knew what each other was going to say and maybe didn’t want to give too much away, which in a small audience anyway led to a serious lack of audience participation. I will directly contrast the tired style of the IIR death by powerpoint conference with the dynamic approach by the Telco 2.0 Mindshare process. I’m not saying that IIR should copy STL’s approach, but they should certainly come up with their own way of using social networking to get the audience involved.
I can certainly understand why the speakers left - 3 days is too long to be out of the loop and we all have busy schedules. If you don’t feel involved as part of the audience and have your boss breathing down your neck for your latest deliverable you will de-prioritise the conference (or you will do the work sat at the back and miss any nuggets that you may have picked up - why be there in the first place if you aren’t going to pay attention).
I certainly felt sorry for Imad Ayoub of the Cyberia Group. He’d come from Saudi Arabia, was there at every session, asked a few intelligent questions and had probably paid for the priveledge (he was not a speaker). He would not have been unreasonable to expect a little more debate between speaker and audience, but that just was not happening because the 60 seats in the room had about 10 people in them.
There is a desperate need for Telecoms, Media and Distribution to converge at the human level and industry conferences are the forum to bring people together so that they can cooperate to actually deliver what we all talk about in our silos. This week though it just seemed that we all took the easy option because it was free, but as a result there was very little value.
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