This week I had lunch with a developer who had been at WordCamp last month. He apologized for not being at my session, but I waved it off. I didn't go to many sessions myself, too many great discussions in the hallway, out on the patio or in the coffee room.

I remembered this was the rationale for how and why we did BloggerCon in the mid-2000s, to bring the hallway conversations into the meeting rooms.

We did this by using a university, its classrooms, and we put someone in front of the room called a discussion leader.

A good DL should know the topic they're leading and be able to start it off with a provocative intro, 5 or so minutes, and then a microphone, held by a student, is moves to a person with their hand up, and they can speak. Not a question. They have something to say. They are the expert of the moment.

The leader can cut them off and move the mike to the next person. (Works even better if there are two roving mikes.) When this works, it really holds everyone's attention.

This idea came from literally hundreds of hours in boring sessions with a panel of experts and people lined up waiting to speak, in the form of a question of course, and getting nervous and composing a speech in their head, and when its their turn they ramble on and on, so of course the good stuff happens in the hallway.

It is harder to do this kind of conference where the "content" takes care of itself. But the BloggerCon type, when it works is far more dynamic.

BTW, the best discussion leaders are teachers and reporters.