Criticism of Mesh Conference

The Mesh conference has not met with universal acclaim. Some criticisms include:

• Ill-defined yet overbroad focus: “Web 2.0” is a term widely used, yet undefined on the conference site, and seems to include everything from bloggers, to marketing to bloggers, to wikis
• Dominance by incumbents: Many speakers are already well-known in their fields and have widely-read Web sites available to communicate their ideas
• Dominance by foreigners: Typically for Toronto, locally- or nationally-available talent is generally overlooked in favour of speakers imported from the United States
• Respectfully, I don't believe this point is true but perhaps I am misinterpreting what you mean by dominance. I have hi-lighted all the speakers that I found who are from or based in Toronto or Canada.
• Looking at that list (making a couple of corrections along the way), I get the following numbers. It seems the criticism is in fact unsupported.
1. Interviewers: Canadian 9, not Canadian 1
2. Speakers: Canadian 21, not Canadian 20
• Overrepresentation by media: Media and journalism are overrepresented in the five organizers and in the speakers
• Dominance by large corporations: Conference marketing copy claims that “[i]n the Web 2.0 world, you don’t need seven figures to develop a product; and you may not even need five figures to market it.” Yet the sponsor list includes multinational companies (eBay, Yahoo, Rogers, Microsoft, Bell, and IBM) that represent, at the latest, Web 1.0, all of which have seven-figure development and marketing budgets
• Overrepresentation by venture capitalists: Sessions belie the garage-startup ethos of “Web 2.0” by concentrating on venture capital, triggering concerns that Mesh is a schmoozing event for “entrepreneurs” interested in selling (out) or flipping their properties
• Substandard Web presence: A conference ostensibly concerning “Web 2.0,” however defined, has a poor Web site that degrades with large fonts and fails to comply with Web standards
• Male-dominated speaker list: As with other technology conferences, most presenters, interviewers, and panelists are men (over 40 vs. fewer than 10 women; two of 11 faces on the speakers page are of women). All five organizers are middle-aged white males
• Replication of existing conferences: By Mesh’s own admission, it is a Toronto analogue (or clone) of conferences in Geneva, Paris, and New York
• Tokenistic acknowledgement of new conference models: Mesh plans to provide a room for an “unconference” amidst an expensive traditional conference
• $350 for two days with this collection of speakers is certainly not very expensive compared with many business conferences put on by IQPC, Federated Press, etc
• Accessibility: The Web site fails common accessibility guidelines (by modest margins in most cases); there is neither an accessibility policy nor any published set of available accommodations for attendees with disabilities
• Press credentials: There is no published policy for press credentials. Given that one of Mesh’s sessions asks the redundant and outdated question “Are bloggers journalists?,” clarification of that exact point seems not to have been imagined for the conference itself
• Errant use of lower case: As the name of an event, Mesh is capitalized
• Confusion with similarly-named conference: MeshForum.org is a conference on networks held in San Francisco May 7–9, 2006
• Reiteration of buzzwords: “Web 2.0,” “conversation,” and numerous variations of “blog” are used repeatedly without elucidation
• Insufficient public discussion of criticism: Organizers’ blogs have little or no discussion of criticisms of Mesh, putting the lie to the oft-used buzzword “conversation”

Wow, there are a lot of petty arguments here. Capitalization!? I mean, really, c'mon man.

contributed by user1897 on May 15 1:34pm

This sounds like bitterness on steroids! Capitalisation? Replication? Confusion with similar named things? What, should Procter change Tide to Clean-O becuase Tide is what happens with the ocean? How is post adding to any conversation? mesh was a project of 5 people who decided to do something. Why not at least acknowledge that? Maybe they didn't nail it to your complete satisfaction, but why slam them for trying? Put on your own quality event for 400 people attending and 60 presenters and see how you do.

contributed by user1493 on May 15 9:49

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