Orcmid has a good post on the back-channel, in which he rightly calls me out for the tone of my earlier post. (In particular, I have since apologized to danah, both in the comments there and in private.) Orcmid's key quote, I think, is this: I absolutely agree with this, so let me first abjure any sense I might have given that I think there is a tech solution here -- this is absolutely something that requires careful meeting design. (I wrote about this in In-room Chat as a Social Tool a couple of years ago.) Where I agree with Orcmid (and Andrew Fiore) is in assuming that the core value in the conference is in its groupness. Where I disagree is in assuming that the group value mostly flows from the plenary presentations. From my experience of professional conferences, almost all such meetings have the same characteristic -- the hallway conversations are better than the contents of the talks. So I am making two assumptions that Orcmid and Andrew don't, I think, share. First, the back-channel is a fact, not a choice. Every conference with Wifi will get a back-channel, and every conference will have Wifi in the next couple of years. So for me, any question of _whether_ to have a back-channel is already barking up the wrong tree -- all conference organizers will have to deal with it in some way or other. Even formally asking people to do part or all of the conference 'lids down' is a strategy that assumes the back-channel, rather than ignoring it. The second assumption is that is there is huge untapped potential for lateral value among groups of attendees, and that if unlocking this value comes at the expense of some of the value for the presenter in having a room full of attentive (or at least not obviously distracted) listeners, there is still reason to explore whether the overall value of the conference is higher. A talk is an incredibly lousy way to transmit facts -- if someone had invited me to the MSFT conference with the promise that I would walk away with all of the facts presented at that conference, but none of the social interaction, I wouldn't have gotten in a taxi to go there, much less a plane. We went for each other, and while talks have a way of shaping the conversation, they are less important now than they were pre-Web, when the pure information in the talk was harder to come by. We're living in a remarkable period of experimentation with social form, where things like FOO Camp abandon older organizational styles in favor of relying on attendee-created value. The back-channel brings some of that value (and tension and anarchy) into more established conference settings. Taking Orcmid up on his challenge, I'm willing to admit the disadvantages of the back-channel -- it was distracting to people who chose to opt out, and emotionally hurtful to those who felt left out. But I don't believe evidence of harm necessarily leads to the conclusion that the back-channel should be banned, both for practical reasons (it is basically unbannable) and philosophical ones (increasing value for lateral communications may well outweigh harm to older conference styles.) So my counter-challenge is: Assume the back-channel is a permanent option, and in any large gathering (greater than two dozen, lets say) assume that at least some participants will form one. Now what?