PRAM Zapped

Zap Your PRAM Mark II is over, and I’m just back from dropping Olle and Luisa at the airport in Halifax at the finish up of their 3-week residency here in Charlottetown. Tack our trip to Iceland on to the beginning of all that, and it’s been an exciting month filled with all sorts of talk and reflection. In the spirit of Dan’s bullet-list of Zap points, here’s my own:

• Dalvay-by-the-Sea, our venue, makes every other conference venue seem like an impersonal prison. It seems absurd, for example, to even consider attending a conference that doesn’t have roaring fires, an espresso machine, and grapefruit slices at the breakfast buffet.
• The breadth and quality of the formal program seemed like the result of careful and deliberate decisions on our part. Which is remarkable given that we threw it together so haphazardly.
• What Dan Misener called “inline discussion” — others might called it “interrupting the speaker, a lot” — seemed, with a few exceptions, to work really well. Unlike the usual 95% formal, 5% “I’ll take a few questions” format, the ratio was often 30% formal and 70% back-and-forth.
• The only thing that didn’t really click for me, Steven’s comments aside, was the live music: I was hoping for a sort of coffee house slash kitchen party atmosphere but what we ended up with seemed more like “nerds in the rec room with the lights on” and I don’t think the performers got the audience they deserved.
• I kept trying to use the word “atemporal” sarcastically after it was used during a session, but nobody bit: apparently atemporal is a word that people (or at least Zap people) use in regular everyday conversations and thus it holds no sarcastic punch. Same thing for “touch-points.”
• I believe the word “space” was used only once at the conference, in the “social networking space” way. This was nice. “Monetize” came up more frequently, but not to an annoying extent.

Like every experience that’s collectively experienced as being awesome, there was chatter about doing another Zap next year, or at least not waiting five years to do it again: I still think we should wait five years (or 7, or 12) to do it again, as it’s important that it’s a completely new thing every time and doesn’t become something that’s a hassle to organize and/or something that’s done only because it’s scheduled to be done. Like Dan says, we should do it again when we’ve got the fire in our bellies for it again.