Actually, you have every right to make the points you do - you’re clearly keen to make things better.

I’ve a couple of vehicles for continuing the conversation after the event: a monthly show highlighting innovation, and another focused on brand/media issues. You and anyone else interested are welcome to get involved any time you have a burning issue.

As a matter of fact, I should have mentioned how the ResearchTalk podcasts helped raise awareness and were a perfect teaser for the Esomar Conference. I felt more prepared this year because I listened. My concern is that organizations seem to be more careful about gaining attention and generate buzz BEFORE an event than AFTER the event (the same way most marketers care more about advertising and new customer acquisition than retention and satisfaction). To be honest, the only way to change this would be to volunteer and take the initiatives, but I don’t have the time right now. I don’t want to give the impression that I am criticizing here. Most organizations are already doing a fantastic job, and I am grateful for researchers who find the time tand get involved in organizations in addition to their regular job…

As for wikis: I agree with you that we don’t need a central place in generql to start conversations (our conversation today is a good example). What I had in mind was concrete workgroups. Wikis are a great tool for collaboration, not conversations. For example, to update ESOMAR’s 25 questions for sample providers… That being said, you are right that this wiki doesn’t need to be centralized and created by an organization. Any reader interested?

Thanks Surinder for stopping by. And congrats again for your excellent show.

I agree with you 200%.

As you probably know I’ve approached some of the organisers with the same idea re. podcasting around the event to elongate shelf life and make them much more of an experience than one-off event.

But your idea goes further and suggests a quite radical but enticing approach where there’s much more user involvement in the design. This sounds a bit like the extreme version of conferences, the ‘unconference’, where participants decide, often on the day, what to present! I like it and support you in wanting to see them move in that direction. But how do we as a community convince the organisers to jump or at least take baby steps?

One aspect I’m not sure about is setting up wikis or a central place to post comments, discuss ideas etc. Fine in principle, but portals in general seem antithetical (thanks, Tas, for teaching me that word) to the trend for a distributed web 2.0 culture where conversations happen all over the place and we use tools like RSS readers, Technorati, delicious, TechMeme etc. to keep track of things.

As an aside, I’ve setup a market research meme tracker (beta version) for community use over at http://www.megite.com/researchtalk. It’s for those like me who are getting increasingly overloaded with feeds to read and yet want to hear what’s happening in the MR blogosphere. It includes your blog as well as many of those on your blogroll. And as I come across new ones, I’ll add them in. It’s a beta so all feedback welcome. BTW, that’s how I was alerted to this post