TimesOpen 2012: Behind the Music

We’re now far enough into 2013 that I’ve stopped mistakenly typing “2012.” That means the TimesOpen team is busy working on this year’s slate of events, plus some other plots and schemes you’ll be hearing about in due course.

In the meantime, we wanted to take a moment to look back on last year’s events. In particular, we thought you might be interested to hear about some changes we made in our approach and some risks we took, and how they worked out.

Best Year Ever

The biggest headline from last year’s events is how successful they were. We’ve had successful events every year, but 2012 stood out for attendance.

Riley Davis for The New York Times Full house for our Big Data event.

Every single event was very well attended. The Bigger Data and Smarter Scaling event was so successful, we had to bring in an emergency reserve of chairs â€" which were subsequently filled.

And then there was the science fair. We’ll get to that in a second.

It’s the Technology, Stupid

We try to play with the venue and the format. Certainly there is no shortage of tech talks in New York City and elsewhere. Since we sit squarely at the intersection of multiple cultures, we like to integrate some of these divergent interests.

Brad Stenger for The New York Times One of the few moments Tom Hughes-Croucher didn’t spend in the Terminal.

Over the years, we’ve tried out different formats, and we’ve explored softer technology topics, such as developer culture and privacy. These sessions ha! ve had mixed results. I went to some of them and enjoyed them. A challenge is that these sorts of events speak to different audiences that don’t entirely overlap with our mainline tech audience.

This year, we chose to focus solely on tech topics, and to push each topic and talk to be as technical as possible. I think just about every single presentation had code on the screen at some point. This approach allowed momentum to build: If you liked the last talk, the next one will be very much like it.

More fundamentally, the audience we reach is a tech audience that wants tech events and conversation. We chose to give the people what they want, and the people showed up in droves. Noted.

The Science Fair

There is no question, among attendees and our staff, that the Open Source Science Fair was the breakout event of the year â€" which is saying something, considering how successful the rest of our eventswere.

Rajiv Pant for The New York Times One of the many great display boards at our science fair.

The genesis of this event was as simple as one staff member (Joe Fiore) musing, “How about an open source science fair” Another staff member latched on to the idea, but we were left with a problem: What would you actually do What would that even be like Would you actually have a science fair With poster boards and ribbons Would this be symbolic Simply a theme Or a full-fledged fair And how, exactly, would that work

Rajiv Pant for The New York Times While the exhibitors ! set up th! eir booths, we kept attendees busy with open source emulators and hardware hacking kits.

We were so concerned that the whole concept might fail that a great deal of our planning effort centered on mitigating the risk. We agreed on the basics without much work: keep the fair portion relatively short, offer food, offer swag, have a slate of speakers. But the fair and speakers needed completely different room setups, so we needed to remove the audience from the room while the crew reset. Would that work Would people leave And the exhibitors would need time to set up their booths. Where would the audience be while that was going on

Before the doors opened, the staff felt certain the night would either be a roaring success or a boondoggle. To our great relief, the concept not only worked, it was a spectacular success. Rebecca Murphey, one of our speakers, was so impressed, she wrote a blog post praising the event and calling for more like it.

We allowed just 45 minutes of crowd time with exhibitors, and this was clearly not enough. We had to forcibly remove the audience from the exhibition hall, and we retained a full house for the following talks. (We fed the audience while we set up the room, then reopened the doors for the talks.)

Some lessons:

1. This was not easy to pull off. Tremendous amounts of prep work went into the event, more than any previous event. We’re thinking about ways to lower the effort level if we do this event again, but there was no escaping the up-front costs.

2. A good risk pays off more than you might expect.

3. Don’t say no to a great idea just because you don’t know how to do it. There was no plan for this event. We had absolutely no concept for what to do â€" it was just a cool idea. In a sense, I think the greatness of the concept caught hold of the team, challenged us and lifted us up to its ! level. It! ’s so very easy to just not try. Sometimes that’s the right move. But I’m glad we went for it this time.

4. If you hold yourself to the same old standard, you’ll produce the same old result. Which might be fine. But it’s a missed opportunity.

Onward

We are starting to flesh out plans for this year, and we appreciate any feedback or suggestions you may have. One big question is: Do we repeat the science fair Or would it be more in the spirit of TimesOpen to try a new bold idea We’ll let you know what we come up with.

Meanwhile, we wanted to thank all of you once again, for attending our events, for reading this blog, and for sharing a few drinks on a couple of weeknights. You made TimesOpen 2012 one for the record books.

Marci Windsheimer for The New York Times NYT dveloper Michael Laing showing off NYT Faбrik.