Chris Pirillo and Ponzi Indharasophang are currently organizing the 6th annual Gnomedex tech conference, a successful and unusual part of the tech conference scene. Chris is the founder and tech evangelist of the online publishing group Lockergnome. Ponzi is the CEO of Lockergnome, a producer of various multimedia and a member of the Blogher community.

I caught the two of them at SXSW and asked them to tell me what they've learned about conference organizing in a Web 2.0 world.

Our conversation covered conference outreach, content development and event structure.

Outreach

Chris says that outreach takes care of itself when bloggers get on board. They are an honest group though, so they'll tell it like they see it. Once when the wifi didn't work well enough at a Gnomedex conference, for example, Chris says he read about it on blogs for the rest of the year.

Ponzi said she's excited about doing outreach within the Blogher online community. Both of them emphasize, however, that online participation does not translate directly to conference attendance - you need to put together a conference that people want to attend.

Content Development

Making the attendance compelling isn't just about the agenda, though. Chris says that no content has been announced for this year's conference and it's already half sold out.

Integrity and authenticity are key. Gnomedex doesn't accept payment for access by speakers and they don't recruit speakers just because of their status. People interested in the conference create the content by volunteering to speak and the organizers vet and structure what becomes available according to what kinds of exciting work the speakers have been doing.

Gnomedex is a single track conference so attendees don't have to miss any of the content. One of the down sides to this approach is that it reduces the organizers' ability to take risks in selecting topics and speakers - the content has to be of interest to as many of the attendees as possible.

When I asked him about what's being called the "unconference" model, Chris said that it only works sometimes and he believes there needs to be some amount of vetting and structure.

Event Structure

One of the ways Chris recommends making organizing decisions is to attend other conferences and change what people don't like. One of their primary goals is to not give anyone anything to complain about. Key things the two of them have learned about conference structure include:

• After loosing his in house developer he stopped using original scripts for conference registration and now happily uses the service mollyguard.com instead.
• Give people food on site to keep them energized and gathered together. Limiting dispersal is key and late returnees from lunch are deflating to the energy of an event.
• The panel structure is played out and based on the old media's centralized broadcast model. Now that more and more people are media producers, turning speakers into discussion leaders is very helpful.
• Put a microphone in the middle of the room for people uncomfortable with going to the front.
• Don't ask people to sign a speaker release form or otherwise limit the purposing of content. If attendees rebroadcast parts of the conference, that's good for everyone.
• The conference industry is a sham, Chris says. He emphasizes that no one should ever have a conference at a hotel. The hotel will always cost far too much money, exploit your dependence on them and make you miserable.
• A party the night before the conference helps people go into the event already knowing each other.

You can read more about Ponzi and her work on her blog, Ponzarelli.com. Chris's blog is at chris.pirillo.com. The Lockergnome tech media extravaganza is at lockergnome.com and the Gnomedex conference at gnomedex.com.