In the one week since we announced the Library Camp of the West (October 10 at the University of Denver, don’t you know) the response has been wonderful. As I write this, we are just shy of 90 people signing up on the attendance page, and many people that I have corresponded with are excited by the possibilities.

I’m certainly excited by the possibilities. I really don’t know what will happen there, but I can’t wait to hear what people across Colorado and beyond are doing in their libraries. I’m excited that a free, unstructured conference that welcomes anyone who wants to spend the day talking about libraries can provide an opportunity that really isn’t there for people who work in an institution that can’t afford to send them out of town for a conference like ALA Annual or one of the other big, national conferences.

Dorothea Salo writes about Tight budgets and conference attendence, and predicts that national conferences will need to dominate their slice of the market and concentrate on getting speakers that will pull in large networks of friends and followers, in the way that Information Today does. (You didn’t think it was a coincidence that so many of their speakers are also popular, well-connected bloggers, did you?) I see no reason to doubt her predictions.

Dorothea mentions briefly how she sees unconferences fitting into all this:

The most interesting opportunity I see is for BarCamp-style participatory conferences both virtual and face-to-face, because these leverage the circle-of-friends model.

And, though she doesn’t spell it out, “BarCamp-style participatory conferences” tend to be free to participants (as Library Camp of the West will be), thus potentially making them more attractive to administrators dealing with shrinking budgets.

I have mixed feelings about this. Of course I have high hopes for the Library Camp of the West and believe it has the potential to be worthwhile for everyone that attends. At the same time, I’d hate to learn that library people were having their requests to go to other conferences denied, with bosses saying “why don’t you just go to that free thing instead?”

This is bringing me back to thoughts about cost and value and some of the other issues Meredith Farkas raised in Value in the online world. Here we are talking about something in real space, not online, and I think the dynamic of “free” is pretty interesting here.

Looking at the attendance page on the wiki again, I see at this moment we have two people from Kansas (*waves to Josh and Royce*) and one from California (*waves to Jezmynne*) signed up with the rest all coming from Colorado and Wyoming. This makes sense to me, as I think most people would be a little leery of asking to go out of state to a free unconference, fearing the boss would say “you want me to buy you a plane ticket and hotel room for a conference run by three people with a free wiki who decided to put on a show?” Free works against you there; free is Not Serious.

But when it’s local the dynamic changes, and the boss can think “all this costs me is a little release time, and with any luck we’ll end up with a few good new ideas, and can publicize a few good ideas of our own. Even if the conference stinks, people will like the fact that I let them go.”

I can’t be sure (because did I mention that I’ve never worked on anything like this before?) but I hope that the free-as-in-beer registration (“Hey, it’s free, let’s give it a try”) will lead to free-as-in-freedom from fear for people who don’t present frequently at conferences (“I guess I wouldn’t mind telling people about that neat thing we are working on”) and some free-as-in-freedom from bureaucracy (“Nobody asked me to join anything, or said I had to come to another meeting in another state in six months.”) I just hope that it doesn’t undercut library people who are trying to get some funding to attend an important non-free conference this year.