David Weinberger responded--see the comments also--to my earlier post on the Poptech conference.

It is a stimulating conference, and I will have more to say about it in a future essay. However, I want to talk about a complaint that I have about this year's conference in comparison to the one that I went to in 2000.

Basically, I think that the quality of the conversation was much lower. The audience contributed less to the discussion, and the hallway conversations were not as exciting.

I think that the main problem was poor time management on the part of many speakers. They did not just cut into the Q&A time--I thought that in several cases the speaker ran out of time before he (time management was mostly a male problem) got to his main point! Thus, a speaker would announce a conclusion almost out of context.

A second problem was that audience questions were poor. But I think that this could be blamed in part on the speakers' poor time management--if the main point comes out of left field at the very end, then you have very little time to come up with a good question about it.

Finally, there was the atmosphere of ideological intimidation that Lessig was a part of. I believe that the left and the right both have something to contribute to discussions about technology and the future. But I frequently found myself in small groups where it seemed as though the price of admission to the discussion was an expression of contempt for President Bush. In 2000, I felt in the minority but people were willing to engage with me. Here, I felt that with a few exceptions, such as Weinberger, the majority of the Poptech attendees were not at all interested in what a conservative or libertarian might say.