When Meredith and the rest of us first started hacking out what has now turned into Five Weeks, the CFP garnered a kind email from a purveyor of a web service which shall remain unnamed. Hi, like what you’re doing, it said (paraphrased), maybe we could give you some content about our service?
We scrutinized it, talked amongst ourselves, and came up with the answer Uhhhhhhh… no thanks.
It’s not that the service in question was bad; we are individually and collectively quite fond of it. It’s not that we are overly susceptible to market cooptation, individually or collectively. (A number of us are notably stubborn about this, in fact. CavLec exists because a former employer of mine tried for a land-grab on my expressive capacities, and I resented it.) And it’s not that we think the purveyor was trying to pull a Lex Luthor on us.
We just didn’t want to be beholden. At all, if we could help it. Because too much professional development is, and we (insofar as I can speak for the organizing committee) think that’s a major barrier facing too many librarians. Face-to-face conferences have to make money, or at least cover costs, and so they have to court vendors for sponsorships and Free Stuff. Degree and certificate programs answer to the green-eyeshaded folks at their institutions. Even non-profits (and they do exist, and we are in fact beholden to one in particular) have to cover costs and justify their existence. This all means expense, and too often, events that slant toward sponsors.
We wanted to do something a little different. We wanted to whomp up the best darn workshop we could for the lowest monetary outlay we could manage, relying on people with an interest in us (like Meredith’s patient husband, who fixed Drupal last week when I broke it) or in the workshop’s mission (like OPAL), and pulling together as much materiel as we could from what we already had available to us.
Because if we can do that, lots of people can, and that opens up the professional-development world to many, many more people, on the content-producing end as well as the content-consuming end. (We have one or two Big Names on our program. Most of our content, however, isn’t from Big Names. I’m quite happy with the quality of what I’ve seen and heard so far—bowled over by the excellence of some of it, in fact.)
Being beholden would change the whole vibe, honestly, and even the least hint of favor-trading creates an unsavory whiff of the exhibition-hall. Same old same-old, business as usual—which is exactly what we didn’t want.
That web-service purveyor did himself no favors. Because of that email, we didn’t link to the service on the appropriate page of our course. We probably would have, otherwise. I’m sure it’ll get mentioned, by us or by one of our information-hound participants, because it is a good service. But we couldn’t afford to give it our imprimatur after that, and so we didn’t.
An interesting thing happened today, though… one of our participants mentioned a web service, and one of its proprietors stopped by to say a friendly hello, sans sales pitch. Participant thought it was great; web service has a new advocate; we-the-committee aren’t beholden, because it’s obvious we weren’t involved. Everybody wins.
Dialogue. Unstructured, unfettered, un-marketplace dialogue. (If you think I’m snarking a bit at the Cluetrain, it’s only because I am.) Sure, the exchange I just mentioned was a short one, hardly the sort of thing to set the world on its ear. But just think what might happen if much-maligned ILS vendors talked to their customers outside of the tightly-scripted events they control. Just think.
I’m glad we stayed unbeholden, because completely by accident we offered a level playing field for service providers and those who need services to find each other and talk turkey. Law of Unintended Consequences in action, in a good way for once!
