UPDATED: BlogHer Discussion Guidelines Online

BlogHer volunteer Ashley Richards has posted the terrific Discussion Guidelines she helped us present to moderators and speakers before the conference.

I urge you to take a look (and I urge everyone to post pdfs the way Ashley has, so they open in your browser window rather than download to your desktop.)

Since we've been giving you a peek into how the conference came together so quickly, I'm happy to tell the story about how Ashley got roped into a task that turned out to be very rewarding for her and successful for BlogHer...in the extended post...

UPDATED: Ashley fixed the link I mention in the extended body, so I've added it there.

How the Discussion Guidelines came together:

The BlogHer Team wanted to have sessions with speakers, but there were a significant number of Advisory Board members and community members who had grown really tired of typical conference set-ups and we urging us to do something different. Ashley references in the Guidelines at least three of the blog posts at the time debating the issue of whether Panel were "dead."

There was a ton of discussion between all of the Team and Advisory Board members on the topic, but we knew we needed someone to be the central clearinghouse for all of these ideas, and someone to mold it into a single readable document with a unified message.

Meanwhile...

Meanwhile, we had a series of folks who had volunteered to help in any way they could, and it came time to take them up on it. Ashley had signed up for the conference early and emailed me to offer her assistance. I had met Ashley several times before. I don't remember the first time, but I had talked to her enough times to get that she was smart and best of all, given or short time frame, seemed like a reliable type of person.

But the real reason I thought of Ashley immediately was because of a post she wrote about her wish-list of how BlogHer would be run. I had immediately forwarded the link to Jory and Lisa and said "we should remember these suggestions." Unfortunately the post link seems broken, so I've emailed Ashley to ask her about it. When she fixes it I'll update the post. UPDATE: Here's the link. Reading it again I note that we didn't follow all of Ashley's advice, but it was the quality of the advice that mattered :)

Anyway, I dumped some links to posts and a bunch of extracted email threads on Ashley and told her to run with it. We went through two rounds of review, the first round with the BlogHer Team and a sub-set of the Advisory Board, the second time with the entire Team/Board. But I would say that 90% of what you see in the Guidelines today is exactly as Ashley first delivered it to us.

All of these behind-the-scenes stories give you an idea of how online and face-to-face interaction both play into how business gets done.

If Ashley was my acquaintance, but I had never read her thoughts on conference management I'm not sure she would have popped into my mind immediately for this task. Conversely, if I had read her post, but had no real sense of her as a person, I'm not sure we would have thrown such an important task, with such a short timeline of deadlines, her way.

There were a couple of people at the conference, notably Anastasia Goodstein in the Opening Session and Matthew Homann in the Closing Session, who urged us to not abandon "traditional" or "offline" forms of communications and connections. Certainly much of BlogHer was accomplished by people we had never met offline (most of our live-bloggers, including their leader, mir verburg, as a tremendously impressive example) but face-to-face meetings can make a difference.

Which is why you should be planning already on BlogHer '06 ;)

Comments

[Koan Bremner]

I was (and remain) impressed with these guidelines - the only issue I had with them was that they didn't seem to be universally respected, either at the conference, or thereafter. I suggest that they be made available at the point of registering for the next conference - maybe a check box could be added to the registration form. It's just a thought! ;-)

[Koan Bremner]

maybe a check box *which should be checked to signify acceptance of the guidelines" could be added to the registration form - sheesh, where is my brain?