Meet space technology improvement for etech and other 'traditional' conferences

Ao the physical space situation here at etech is horrible. The rooms are too small – it is not only sold out but over sold. We are sitting in the isles and standing 2 deep at the back of the room. Here is a summary of the current issues and some potential solutions.
Venues – flexible support for interaction:
It seems there is a real market for innovative collaborative community meet space. With the emergence of camps and unconferences what are the space that can support these events. The space where we meet – like the nowhere store was.
Accommodations – We need integrated diversity:
I am staying the youth hostel (it is the nicest one I have ever been in). Because for this event I want a nice bed to sleep in and I don’t care if I need to share with others. I am paying $72 for three nights (they make $96 if they sell out my 4 bed room). Some want the kind of accommodations that cost $300-$500 a night. How can you have those market nees and everything in between near by.
Food – good food reasonable cost:
How can you feed people good food for low cost. I think most coming to a conference would be able to afford about $10 a meal. Presentation doesn’t matter really the food does. This is what we paid for food at the internet identity workshop – people loved both lunches.
Hotels are making a lot of money right now off conferences – charging a lot per day for people to attend an event and be fed.
Carpooling – How do we get there?:
There are some sides that do this like space share but it is not totally easy to do yet and you have to re-enter a profile all the time. How do I put out a carpool request on my blog that will get circulated to the people who are also traveling from my area and might be driving. How can this be managed in ways that don’t overwhelm everyone with my request but just those who might help.
Process – What are the processes we use when we gather?:
The submit, committee select, present model is a bit stale. I have gone to three talks this afternoon and keep thinking tell me something I don’t know yet. If you are going to present get to the point. I am a big believer in the short presentation – we use them at planetwork 5-10 min. Go through your concepts faster cause I get what you are saying.
Some things deserve the full attention of the whole group but only about 1/10th of what they make us give our full attention to.
Examples of this would be Bruce’s talk last night but – give him a lot of time because he has a reputation of killer talks that are engaging. Folks were not doing their e-mail during it they were listening. This morning it was the light table interaction demo (it was super amazing) the there was no typing. As well Linda Stone’s insightful talk about what was coming next after Continuous Partial Attention. Basically she said ‘analogue’ is the new ‘digital’ as jair would say.
There is open space technology, speed geeking, appreciative inquiry lots of different change processes [see Change Handbook]
Ambient Findablity of people:
(I am writing this post in the Ambient Findability presentation)
Help me find the people in this stack of 1,300+ folks that I want to meet and talk to. Who has identity problems that I can help people find the resources in our community? Who is working on socially good tech stuff that would love to know about Planetwork? Can applications like attendr and Hallway help? Can we get investment in these open source tools – if you want you can use the something like $10,000 + $10 a head intronetworks (that I get to use it for PCForum.) That is not accessible.

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