In a session yesterday Tim Harcourt commented on how great it is that Adelaide people can simultaneously be big fans of sport, and big fans of ideas & the arts. I’ve been putting this to the test personally by seeing how well I can take in ideas at today’s sessions after staying up until 3am watching rugby and cycling, and whether having taken in these ideas I’ll still have the energy left to support some local artists (the Sea Thieves & The Silvermine Tapes) playing a gig at the Prince Albert (oops, that was the Grace Emily) later … oh,yes, and watching stage 1 of Le Tour afterwards.

I have taken my leave from the festival a little early, having absorbed just about all the ideas I can take for now, but perhaps foolishly, rather than getting some sleep before the evenings activities I’ve retired to Le Rayon Vert’s on site office to write a bit about the festival while it’s fresh in my mind. I’m not going to write about the content of the sessions at this point, maybe I will later, but for now you can check out the three “official” blogs – Blogocracy, Public Opinion and Pavlov’s Cat – for some thoughts on specific sessions (and sometimes I’ve had something to say in comments). Each one already has multiple posts on the festival and no doubt there will be more when they’re not too busy attending the festival to write about it. Also, Radio Adelaide are broadcasting all of the talks and are making them available for download. Details aren’t up yet at the time of writing, but when they are I may make some specific recommendations based on the sessions I attended. This is a wonderful service that they are providing, and if you make use of it then you should consider a subscription to help them out.

For now I have some ideas about the festival itself. I should preface all of this by making it clear that these are just minor gripes, and I consider the festival a great success.

1. Advertising. I remember first seeing a brochure about the festival about 6 months ago (or maybe even more). The next I heard was last Thursday when I read about it on Blogocracy. Most of my reading lately has consisted of exam scripts that I’ve been marking, so maybe I haven’t been paying sufficient attention to what’s going on in the outside world, but still, I think that if I, as someone rather enthusiastic about the whole thing, can manage to almost not notice that it’s on, then perhaps it can be advertised a bit better.
2. Audience Questions. I just ran into a friend who didn’t make it to the festival, but based on previous experience the first thing that came to mind for him was the tendency of some people to be really annoying at question time. Of course, this is not confined to the festival of ideas, I attend many public forums and it almost always happens, though after going to a whole 3 day weekend of events I was really getting sick of it. So what exactly am I talking about? Most of the time it is a matter of people using question time to make their own speech. These varied greatly in quality. At the extreme end there are the crackpots who ramble seemingly without purpose, but this is very rare, I only encountered a couple. Incidentally I did notice a correlation between this sort of non-question and casual racism of the “I’m not racist but…” variety. Other times they just went over things everyone knows, or which had already been discussed, or generally strayed from the point. Some showed signs of having prepared in advance, quotes and all. And some were articulate speakers making completely relevant arguments. What all these people seem to have missed, however, is that the often large audiences were not there to here them speak, and chances are the guest speakers on stage were not going to be bowled over by their great insights, since as experts in the field they’ve probably heard them before. Now some of these audience members are, no doubt, serial offenders who prepare their own speech in advance whenever attending such events. But the majority, I suspect, are just reacting to having heard a good speaker. What they may fail to understand is that everyone in the audience is reacting in a similar way, we all think of how a point made by the speaker relates to us, and would love to bring it up. We all think of some angle that hasn’t been touched on, or a great rebuttal to a point made. And many of us then think – do I want to know what the people on stage have to say to this, or do I just want to show off how clever I am? Would the other audience members be interested in this? How can I phrase this as a succinct question ? But some people don’t. They go up and tell their life story, or expound on their philosophical musings instead. I consider this to be quite selfish, since in most cases, the question time is very limited. Every minute they ramble on, we lose a minute from the guest speakers, or we lose an actual question from someone else. It bothers me because there were plenty of excellent questions, and some of those had quite rushed responses because of the time wasted by someone else. Now I’ve rambled on about this quite a bit (I just wanted to make sure you knew what I was talking about from personal experience … that’s what blogs are for anyway), and probably out of proportion to the problem but the frustration accumulates every time it happens, but one final point is that there were some people who asked a great question …. and then just kept on talking. This happened quite often actually, and I don’t think these people are particularly selfish or fond of the sound of their own voice, it seemed more like they were sort of caught in the spotlight and didn’t know what else to do other than keep talking.
   So what to do about this? I think they need to establish better guidelines for the session chairs. These need to be flexible, for a session with one speaker and a small attendance it might be quite appropriate for people to get up and give personal anecdotes. In full sessions, with little available time however they really need to establish the ground rules before question time, and enforce them strictly. That means cutting people off if they ask a question and then start to ramble, or if they get a couple of sentences in without any sign of a what, where, who, why, how, which or something to that effect. Some might suggest that I am railing against public participation which would go against the spirit of the festival, but I just want everyone to get their fair say, and for everyone in the audience to get the most out of the experience.
   A slightly more radical plan is that they could actively encouraged heckling of audience speech makers. That’s not a question ya wanker! Did anyone who attended not feel like shouting out something to that effect at some point?
3. Online Content As mention above, there are some officially endorsed blogs, and the sessions have all been recorded and will be available online, which are both terrific things but I’d like to see them utilise the internet a bit more. Part of this comes out of the desire to have public engagement beyond the audience questions. It would be great to have an online forum for each session where people can go and discuss it afterwards, and where possible, include the guest speakers. I’m thinking of something along the lines of the forums that Four Corners have. The blogs mentioned above will fill this role to some extent at least.
4. Young People The audience was definitely skewed towards an older demographic, and it’s great that all those people are there, but shouldn’t young people be interested in ideas too? The under 30’s weren’t absent but they did seem to be poorly represented. I suspect that this might have been different in the forums with the guys from the Chaser though. I think it would be great for the festival to encourage involvement of younger people. They could run some specific events – “Festival of Young Ideas” or something, aiming at issues that would interest younger people. That said I would be reluctant to go too far down the road of “youth issues”, since of course, all of the issues dealt with in the festival are as much issues for the youth as for anyone else. Given the “which way to the future” theme, one might argue that all them are. Another approach could be to have some younger speakers too, though this again has its limitation since there are good reasons for having older speakers (ie the experience and expertise that makes people want to hear what they have to say). Alternatively they could provide free beer for under 30’s. That would definitely work. But try the first couple of ideas first.

(update: I’ve now added some links to downloads of recommended sessions)