Flutterby™! : Great conferences

Scoble's comments are down, so I can't put this there, but a few additions to his 17 things to make a conference great. #4 is "Start a secret party society". I'd go further: Encourage lots of small parties, make them easy to find, and make them numerous enough that nobody feels left out. The SIGGRAPH party that Phil, Leo, Sam and I threw was one of the best there, not because it had nudity (which it did), but because it had a wonderful mix of luminaries and newbies, and because the party was small enough that they all interacted. If it's a big official party then the usual cliques will form. If it's a bunch of small intimate parties there'll be more mingling. A few of his other suggestions can be boiled down into: Make the conference newspaper virtual, and let the community feed information into it. If it's a show, I want to know what the attendees thought was cool, not what the organizers thought was cool.