Recently I answered Anton Mannering’s call for some community involvement in starting up a new, informal monthly conference. Anton’s idea as I’m reading it is to build on the success of 12 Irish entrepreneurs’ field trip to Silicone Valley – the outing known as Paddy’s Valley – and get some of that mojo working back home, mimicking the convergence of knowledge, access and funding that the real Valley excels at offering start-ups.

An excellent idea, even if there are some doubters about the idea’s initial presentation. I don’t have a horse running in the Web 2.0 Startup Funding race, but I enjoy organising events and I love conversation around technology, so it seemed like a good thing to contribute some time to over the long holiday break. But it also got me thinking about how bored and frustrated I am with conferences in general.

A while back, I was at a London conference I think is pretty typical. The event’s keynote speaker was a high-profile bloke with a lot of buzz and well-deserved street cred, a speaker most tech conference organisers are quite keen to have. And he’s an interesting guy. Still, I spent most of that 20 minutes discreetly trading post-it notes with Johnnie Moore in the back row.

The far more interesting and valuable part of the evening was the drinks bit after, when I got to find out a lot more about and make connections with other people in the audience I’d not met before, and had the chance to ask The Speaker a couple of questions not directly related to anything in his speech but very relevent to what I was doing at the time.

The speeches are always too long, and the mingling bit is never long enough. I think I have two new conference mantras, which may or may not be adopted in Anton’s project, but I still think are worth some thought.

Down with speakers, up with conversation.

If you have 25 tech startups in a room, and one venture capitalist, why is the VC giving a speech about what she wants to talk about instead of talking to the 25 startups about what they want to ask about?

A speech is by definition a static thing. It can be handed out, blogged or videoed. While it may be a fabulous speech, I can consume whatever it has to offer before or after the event. What I probably can’t do outside the event is actually talk to the speaker. No matter how amazing the speech may be, the chance to ask questions, pick up on conversational points and hear what other people have to say in response is likely to be far more valuable.

Down with experts, up with expertise.

Everyone converging around an event has knowledge, experience, curiosity and perspective to offer. Everyone has expertise in some niche that has value for others. Why are we only setting up to listen to a few voices?

I think this is true even for people outside the event’s core topic, especially since we all tend to mostly talk with people inside our own niches. A salesperson may not know anything about coding web applications, but that salesperson may well know what mobile applications customers are asking about the most when purchasing mobile phones, what sales teams really need in a Web 2.0 CRM application, or they key issues users have in migrating to competing applications.

I like a lot of the newer approaches to conferences, like BarCamp and Un-Conferencing and Open Space, though I honestly think that at this point, I’m more interested in subversive conferencing. Why not do something where everyone is given a heads up on who everyone else is, a couple of key people are initially pinned to particular bar stools, and the wisdom of the crowd is basically allowed to run rampant?

Sounds fun, doesn’t it?