Who Cares?

While I'm still getting caught up on sleep and my blog reading, I've already read a dozen or so posts about Tech Policy Summit, which came to a close yesterday evening. On behalf of myself and my business partner, thank you to all of the bloggers and press who participated in the event, on stage and in the audience. As one of the Summit's advisors, Sean Garrett, has been reminding all for some time, social media is an excellent way to engage in dialogues and bring more people into the conversation.

While we've made a choice to use this blog primarily to point people to important news stories and others' blogs, I think today is a good day to get a bit more personal than that. I've been involved in the planning of other tech events where bloggers have written about the event after the fact, and I can tell you that it's always enlightening (and sometimes surprising) to see how others perceive the conference and what they choose to write about. Some of you may know firsthand what I'm talking about. You put yourself out there when you encourage blogging about your business, as we did. And it's always interesting to see what that yields.

Perhaps ironically, one of the events I was involved in was BlogOn, and many of the speakers at that event in '05 talked about the power of the blogosphere and the need for companies to be more transparent and to recognize the importance of listening to the conversations that take place via blogging. My business partner and I get that, and we are listening.

At the same time, we'd like to speak up and clarify a few points. Not just about Tech Policy Summit because, frankly, we need time ourselves to decompress and take in all that we learned. And we will do that before we announce plans for the '08 event.

Instead, I wanted to comment on some of the blog posts we read that hypothesized on the make-up of the audience and tied together the turnout at TPS with the overall level of interest (or disinterest) in tech policy issues. On Tom Foremski's Silicon Valley Watcher, he wrote that there was a low turnout at the event that "shows that Silicon Valley's traditional lack of interest in politics continues, despite numerous reasons why such ignorance can be damaging."

As I commented on Tom's Silicon Valley Watcher, the fact that not all of the people who registered for the event showed up had to do with a variety of issues -- yes, the weather was a factor. It was not, however, evidence of the apathy that exists in Silicon Valley. Not to say there doesn't need to be more excitement and involvement in tech policy issues. Of course, we feel there does. But, with over 280 people registered and a capacity of 300 attendees, we were very pleased with the level of interest we received in planning this event.

Still, we applaud Tom and the other bloggers who are beating the drum and asking the important questions...who cares about tech policy? We do, and we'll continue to work with our partners and the blogosphere to bring more people into the conversation.

--Natalie Fonseca