http://www.centaurconferences.co.uk/Conference.aspx?GroupId=44eb4d85-f3e8-4b58-903c-6c832eefc53d&conferenceId=b99cfd27-7133-4918-ba2c-d6a7dd2277c7&item=Intro

This is link to upcoming 2 day conference : Web 2.0 and Social Media for Research & Insight. cost for the 2 days is over £1500

The subjects on offer and people look good, but it made me wonder how these ideas can be made more accessible to clients (never mind individuals) who find it difficult to justify this kind of money on emerging areas.

Is there a true web 2.0 alternative to opening up the knowledge more rapidly to a wider audience than 2 days out of the office.

One of Kevin Kelly's 10 Principles of the Network Economy was Feed The Web. How can we help do make this kind knowledge free and create an insight market for everyone?

Martin
PS I have nothing to do with Centaur btw

A wiki or similar, with hosted webchats/podcasts/ opportunity for comments? Conference calls using skype or similar? Put the whole thing together as an ongoing online conference, and charge people £20 to register nd access the content??... but it needs someone to organise the whole thing and get the ball rolling...

www.research-live.com/conferences

Martin, The link above is for Research 2.0: meeting the challenge of the next wave in online research is coming up in Dec with very competitive delegate fees.
It's a 1 day conference exploring the concept of Research 2.0, how it affects your business and how you can make competitive gains from new collaborative relationships. Major clients will be taking the platform and the programme will close with a Pecha Kucha session.

Chris

Yeah, I'd actually really like to see a version of BarCamp for researchers operating in this area (that's an informal, collaborative conference run by web designers and usability people). Even the cheaper conferences are a lot of money for one day.

http://barcamp.org/ (NB does Facebook allow HTML????)

I may be wrong, but I don't get the impression that researchers are open to the web in the same way that tech people and designers are.

You could probably use Facebook or better still one of the other bloggy/networking sites (based on Ning, for example) to deliver some of the same things virtually. Kind of lacks critical mass, though, right now unless there's some underground movement that I'm not aware of.

I think the barcamp idea is really interesting. Perhaps we should see if we cna use some of the relevant FaceBook groups to leverage something.

One problem is that many people may not want this information to be available too cheaply. For examople, I get paid to speak at a number of events around the world because some people feel what I have to say is useful (I also do many events without being paid). If that information is suddenly made available to many more people, at very low cost, will that result in less income to me and others like me? Will it result in less income to event organisers, which could result in either higher fees or fewer services?

Alternatively, more exposure, more sharing, more co-creation would enable all of us who take part to increase our skill-sets and enlarge the market.

£400 is not competitive, though, except in a big corporate sense. I'd love to go, absolutely can't justify it. Of course if I had been slightly smarter i'd have written a paper for it...

You compare it with events like dconstruct ( http://2007.dconstruct.org/ ) at £85 a throw - now that's something I'd be willing to camp out to get tickets for.

If there is an event in London, that is £100-£200 train fare for many of us (for the non-UK people even worse!). What sort of fee, for a one-day collaborative event would be attractive?

Hi Ray

I think the network effect must rules in the longer term - more connections more value for everyone. More connection more opportunities.



Martin

I absolutely love the idea of a barcamp for MR - it even has an obvious name... they have BarCamp, we have MRCamp :-)

To get the ball rolling, I just registered http://mrcamp.org (domain name may take some time to propagate through the interwebs, if so, you can access mrcamp.pbwiki.com directly in the meantime)

Anyone up for it?

I think it would be very cool. :-)

Was there no interest in this idea? I'd certainly be up for afternoon/evening/day of Research 2.0 discussions. Especially if it were in Silicon Valley or Toronto.

No, it sort of fell by the wayside.. perhaps it's still too early for this, or the number of potential interested parties within market research too small to make things like this feasible..