Derek Sivers at TED: How to Start a Movement (h/t to @hnshah for showing this video during his talk at LessConf).
I was just perusing some of the tweets on the @lessconf twitter stream and started backing up through some of the conversations. Jeebus, it’s crazy-town out there.
Several people called the guys at Less out for the fact that the speaker lineup for LessConf is all-male and all-white. Additional pile-ons ensued when Allan responded to the criticism. He’s all defensive now, he really is a racist, etc., ad nauseam.
One notable blogger even went so far as to take issue with the fact that an all-female conference Allan recommended as an alternative was only $99 versus LessConf’s $600 (actually currently $402), implying that Allan was making some kind of back-handed value judgement on the other conference.
I’d be pretty fucking defensive and aggressive back at folks, too, if they called me out in public as a racist over something that only in the most superficial and thinly-construed interpretation might indicate such.
For one thing, you are only seeing the end result of their speaker acquisition. How do you know whether they did, or did not, invite women and/or people of different ethnic backgrounds to speak? Is it possible they did, and those folks didn’t accept, or couldn’t make it? Regardless of whether they did or did not, why is it their responsibility to present an ethnically diverse lineup at their conference, when the event is paid for by them and their completely voluntary attendees?
Suppose, for shits and giggles, they did initially invite 21 speakers, half white/male and the other half non-white/non-male, and one east-Asian tranny nutter that dresses like Abe Lincoln. Further, suppose all 10 non-white/male as well as Tranny Abe declined. Why should there be some additional burden on the conference organizers to go seek out additional non-white/male participants in place of one or more of the folks who accepted the initial invitation? Does it matter if they only initially invited 5 non-white/male (and Tranny Abe)? Does it matter if it was only 2? It doesn’t matter, because the complaint is bullshit.
I attended this conference last year and it was great. It presented a diversity of ideas, and this year looks to be more of the same, and I’m fuck-all looking forward to it, and these douche-nozzles aren’t going to ruin my high about getting on the road to Atlanta tomorrow. I couldn’t give two shits if the person on stage talking is black, indian, asian, male, female, post-operative, twelve years old, or whiter than Caspar Weinberger - I just want to learn something.
I don’t know these guys super-well, but I’ve had many many personal, face-to-face interactions with them both, at local user group meetings and other conferences, as well as a couple of years of Twitter conversations. They’re good guys. And this type of public name-calling is pure undeserved bullshit.
“A conference for entrepreneurs, marketers, designers, coders, business people, freelancers or anyone who wants to be inspired by amazing business people.”
A few months ago I attended a one-day conference here in town called LessConf put on by a local company and I wrote a rather lengthy blog post about it and why I enjoyed it so much. They’ve scheduled LessConf2010 for May 21-22 in Atlanta (2 days this year) and I’ve already registered to go. The price is a little higher this year, but still a very reasonable $402 during early registration. The lineup is still under wraps, but if it’s anything like last year it will be stellar.
They only have 250 seats. Go register now. You’ll really enjoy it, and I’ll buy you a beer while we’re there.
Allan has been posting up the videos of the presentations from 2009 to the Less blog, on a schedule that appears to match Scott Adams’ schedule for sending out Dilbert newsletters, that being “approximately whenever he feels like it”. I think at this point the only ones missing are the Gary Vaynerchuk presentation and the discussion panel, and I’m not sure if those are going up or not, but I’ve copied in the links to the others are below, in case you need more convincing.
Keep an eye on the Less blog to see if the GaryVee video shows up, cause it was great (as was the panel).
…and all I got was an entire day full of great insight (and a great t-shirt).
A couple of weeks ago, I spent a Saturday at the Times-Union Center in Jacksonville attending LessConf. This was a day-long event put on by local company LessEverything, makers of LessAccounting, LessTimeSpent, and a host of other products and applications. Billed as “A conference for marketers, designers, coders, business people, freelancers or anyone who wants to be inspired by amazing business people,” it did not disappoint.
Except at first, when we were all sitting in the theater and it seemed like nobody really had it together or knew what was going on. Steve finally threw it to the audience for jokes while we waited for the T-U folks to get the audio and stage set up. I told my whale joke, someone told a penis joke, and it threatened to quickly go down hill from there. Luckily, everything was ready and we moved on to the first speakers.
