[Strawbale] ESBG 2011 and the future of strawbale building

[Tomáš Znamenáček]

Hello!

Thank you for the opinions. I’m a member of the ESBG team, one of my main responsibilities was taking care of the hardware on the conference. I cannot speak for the team, but I can offer some personal views.

> The schedule was tight, to say the least. We were at the clock; a countdown-device counted 20 minutes, starting again in the second it reached zero.

The short format of the talks was considered a feature, we wanted something like TED.com. I wrote the countdown device (an iPad app) and I can assure you it did not restart automatically after reaching zero. It’s a minor point, but you should be careful about taking a license when writing a critique.

> Questions were entirely postponed to after the last presentation at 5 pm

Which I still consider a good thing, because otherwise it would be impossible to keep the schedule. Having the discussion postponed to after the talks was also good in that we had all the speakers on the stage, which lead to nice discussion between them. In each case there were just a few questions from the public, so that I don’t feel like we stifled the discussion by the conference format.

> Unfortunately even off the stage it was not possible to learn much, because whatever was interesting and not per se understandable in the presented system turned out to be a secret of the inventors.

Can you please be more specific? I felt the opposite way, that most of the speakers were very happy to share.

Tomáš Znamenáček

-- 
Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent
if no birds sang there except those that sang best. –Henry Van Dyke