Spontaneous Conferences around Hot Topics

William Grosso @ September 18, 2007

Recently, the valley has seen a trend towards mini-conferences. One or two day events centered around a hot technology topic. The idea seems to be: move very fast, get all the top names around a topic with a lot of buzz, and get it all done within 60 days (120 days at the top).

There’s definitely value in this. It’s a little disconcerting because most of the really hot topics don’t yet have 2 days worth of solid knowledge around them, at least not that’s ready in presentation form. But getting the coverage in one place, and talking to people with similar interests, and overhearing the hallway conversations, is probably worth the price of admission (for example: Dave McClure’s Graphing Social Patterns).

So here’s the mini-conference I’d love to see: cloud computing. A 2 day event covering how to build a datacenter in the cloud, complete with case studies and talks by people who’ve done it.  I really do want to know this, and it seems hard to learn via web browsing.

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