Loïc Le Meur reflects upon the Etech conference to come up with the secret sauce of an unwired conference (go read the descriptions):
-Prepare the sauce ingredients on a wiki and let it grow during the conference
-Make wifi and juice available everywhere
-Gather some of the most authoritative bloggers and mix them with baby bloggers
-Add a lot of Apple juice
-Add a conference moblog
-Open a conference chat room
-Project the chat room when the panel talks
-Create a trackback link for all conference sessions so that people can find quickly what bloggers think and say about the sessions
-Technoratize the sessions so that people can also see what bloggers say about the conference.
-Manage the side effects
-The participants will create even the programme of the conference
-The participants will self organize conferences, using tools such as meet-up
Essentially, this is what Socialtext Eventspace brings to an event, without having participants have to have their own blogs, Macs or Docs.
Of course, this first time exposure leads people to start their own blogs, switching to Mac is worth it, there is no substitute for a real Doc and every event reveals a new conference blogger.
If you want it to be less explosive, pick and choose the ingredients. But now that Wifi has become a standard event requirement, you can leave it to the regular conference bloggers or let everyone participate.
UPDATE: Conference blogging in action at Demo 2004.
