Conference Calendar Report
What happened when I invited everyone to talk in-person about a different thing every day for a month
In January, I posted about the Conference Calendar, my experimental passion project to get folks together in public venues to talk about specific topics— humans only, peer-to-peer, unmediated, and offline. Kinda like a Trivia Night, but for non-trivial things.
To start the project, I came up with and wrote teaser descriptions for topics ranging from Parenting Teens and Public Banks to UFOs and Paranormal Experiences. Then I found some quiet, friendly cafes and bars in Berkeley and Oakland that were up for participating during their normal business hours. I scheduled the discussions for February: a topic, time, and place every day, except for Fridays, when no venues needed additional clientele.
My designer pal Hans and I created a large-format broadsheet, the Conference Calendar, modeled on the old movie house calendars that culture-conscious urbanites used to put on their refrigerators each month. I printed thousands of them, then thumbtacked them up, handed them out, and left stacks of them in various appropriate places. I created a website with the same information and a mailing-list signup form. I also reached out to local media and influencers to get some coverage— but nothing came of that, except for a mention on the socials of a Berkeley city councilmember.
Then, all through February, I went to each “event” to see what would happen and facilitate the discussion if needed.
So, how did it go? Attendance was inconsistent, but when folks showed up, it was super fun. I was never good at small talk, but having a topic really helps. On most days, at least one or two people showed up, and sometimes the group was larger. Most attendees were strangers to me, although friends and family also came. Many of the strangers came back again to subsequent discussions, sometimes bringing spouses or friends, which was encouraging.
Only once did the group become large enough to be mingle-able, with more than one concurrent conversation. That was on the last day, when the topic was Procrastinators Anonymous. Appropriately enough, two people there said that they’d been meaning to come to one of the Conference discussions, and they’d gone to that one because it was their last chance.
And some lonely times, no one came— or maybe people had come, but saw that there wasn’t a group and decided to leave without saying hello.
With the general public, you don’t know who you’re gonna get, so I was afraid that scary people or bores might show up and ruin the mood. But I was impressed by everyone who came, who (besides the people I already knew) tended to be either retirees or people in their 20s and 30s. They were all interesting, knowledgeable, and nice folks that I’m glad to have met. Of course, it’s a biased sample— they’re all people who shared an interest in the discussion topics I chose, and perhaps also resonated with how I described them, and with the Conference Manifesto on the back of the calendar. Plus, given that the Conference had no media coverage or other social proof, they were all independent-minded enough to do something that isn’t recognized as a Thing To Do by any lifestyle authority, and lacked familiar framing.
During February, I promoted the Conference on Nextdoor and LinkedIn, but only a couple of people learned about it via Nextdoor. Another attendee had known about it from my Main Street Journal post. Everyone else who didn’t already know me learned about the Conference from the printed calendar. Its eye-catching design (”neo-post-retro”?) helped. Several told me that the calendar’s visual coolness made them want to check it out. As one emailed, “[T]ell your graphic designer pal— GOODMFJOB!”
So, what’s next for the Conference Calendar? I emailed the organically-grown mailing list to see who wants to join a Conference Council to answer that question, and eight people said yes. With my wife and me, that’s ten. We’re having our first kickoff meeting this Sunday morning at our house, and we’ll hopefully start figuring it all out. I’m thinking that we’ll schedule discussions less often, maybe two or three times a week, and so each calendar will cover multiple months. I do still want it designed and printed, although that’s the big expense. Printing 2,500 calendars here, two-color offset on newsprint, costs $640. I’ll also be glad to split the facilitation responsibilities with other Conference organizers, so I don’t need to go to all of the discussions— February was pretty exhausting for me in that regard.
The whole Conference concept is simple, and the only thing that people get confused about is that there’s no presentation by an expert or author. It’s just people talking about something. Anyone else can set up the same kind of calendar in any other city, under any name. I’d love to see this happen, and if there’s interest, I’ll create an open-source repository to share all the topics, descriptions, and Conference-friendly venues that I’ve come up with, and where others elsewhere can add their own.
In late February, my son clued me into the storefront co-working space Local Economy in Berkeley that’s also hosting local discussions, and was co-founded by Alexis Madrigal, host of the popular local-issues talk show Forum on KQED radio. I went there and showed them the Conference Calendar, talked with them, and they recommended the Bathers Library in Oakland as another similar project. So maybe this is all a trend— “One, two, trend,” as the journalism joke goes. I forgot to ask them why they decided to name their place “Local Economy,” but somehow I think I know.
NEWS
CIVICS
Invitation to a New Civic Future, Connective Tissue (February 10)
Manifesto: Against a backdrop of crumbling national institutions, we can restore our civic life through a participatory, fun, local, and relational civic renewal movement that we can build over generations. Join us!
Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management, Stir to Action (March 3)
Democracy has broken down because, since the 1960’s, people have left membership org’s like scouts, clubs, unions, and PTAs— and the surviving orgs are supported by grants, not membership dues. This replaced democratic participation with a top-down, professionalized civic culture dictated by memberless NGOs. Let’s recover the membership ethos.
ENERGY
Virginia to Utilities - Do More With the Existing Power Grid, Canary Media (March 3)
Virginia will soon require its power utilities to report detailed data on grid electricity flow. This first-of-its-kind legislation will let impartial analysts find smart, cheap alternatives to handling peak loads, such as batteries and line sensors, instead of requiring everyone to not question and automatically approve the utilities’ pleas for more money to build poles and wires.
CARING
How Babysitting Co-ops Build a Village, Reason to Be Cheerful (March 2)
The Mt. Airy Babysitting Co-Op in northwestern Philadelphia has been running since 1974, as a “village” of families that babysit for each other. Instead of paying with cash, they earn and spend points tracked on a spreadsheet. Member families vet and vote on admitting other families into the co-op. You can find more such co-ops on the Sitting Around website.
What Do Childcare Co-ops Have to Do with Economic Power? Prentiss’s Substack (March 3)
As a recent NYU paper argues, NYC’s promise to deliver universal childcare presents a “real utopian” opportunity to create an efficient citywide co-op infrastructure that pools back-office functions for community-based childcare providers. Otherwise, private equity will likely buy out, consolidate, and centralize the sector themselves, to extract maximum profits from public funding allocated for childcare.
MAKING
Community Makerspace Development Strategy, Mechanism (February 26)
Mechanism, a nonprofit, developed a roadmap for creating and growing makerspaces based on interviews with makerspace leaders nationwide. Stages include establishing a trusted foundation and culture, building internal systems, and expanding, for example, by collaborating with schools and local businesses.
FINANCE
New Tools for Funding the Commons, Resilience (March 12)
A survey of communal, non-money tools for allocating human effort and exchanging goods, including mutual credit systems in which participants maintain their own private ledger of credit and debt, credit commons systems that simplify debts for all participants, and vouchers denominated by resource quantities rather than currencies.
TECH
Organizing Gamers from the Bottom Up, Convergence (February 17)
The gaming industry increasingly answers to Wall Street over loyal gamers, trapping them and narrowing their choices. The Players Alliance, a gamers’ union supported by a Discord server, gives gamers a voice, to parallel the current effort to unionize game workers. Last year, the Players Alliance lobbied the Treasury Department and Congress to block the buyout of EA. For many members, this was their first involvement in politics.
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