On the conference I'd like to see
I’m in Sweden at the moment, taking part in an amazing Nordic Ruby conference. Yesterday, I gave a talk called Better: A Field Guide to Continuous Improvement, which was about topics that have been much on my mind over the past few years. Several of the other talks here have dealt – directly or indirectly – with the same topics, and being here has just reinforced how much I’d love to see a specific sort of conference.
In my head, I’m calling this conference BETTER. It would be devoted to the idea of improvement, of getting better, but not solely for professional expertise. The talks would each fall into specific slots on two metrics. First, they’d be divided up by domain:
- improving professionally (skills),
- improving socially (moral and ethical), and
- improving personally (health, mood, welfare)
Then, for each domain, there would be three sorts of talks:
- research,
- technology, and
- practice
Altogether, that makes for nine slots – and as examples for the sort of talks I’d most love to see across those:
- professional / research: K. Anders Ericsson
- professional / practice: Atul Gawande
- social / research: Dan Ariely
- social / technology: Lauren McCarthy
- personal / technology: Eric Friedman
- personal / practice: Buster Benson
So, who’s in? Should I kickstart this ala XOXO? (Or: I wouldn’t be upset if someone took this idea and ran with it.)