We’re seeing a pattern, in political town halls, industry conferences, and even award shows: the concept of a “panel of experts” at the head of the grand ballroom dispensing wisdom to the masses’ is dead.  I blame mobile phones, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

In August 2009, congressmen and senators scattered out of Washington back to their home districts like so many rats carrying plague.  They had to get Health Care Reform passed, and it was time to bring in the proletariat on the deals they had already been cooking.  The problem is that the prols didn’t play ball.  The quick reaction was to chalk it up to sour grape astro-turfing by the GOP– and once it showed up, I have little doubt they did amplify it wherever possible– but I think that people are just as upset with the Town Hall format as they are with the actual message trying to get preached at them by their “representative”.  Thanks to the internet, the masses are much more connected and have their opinions (right or wrong) much more set before they go to the meeting; thanks to social networks, people now have the baseline expectations to participate in a two-way conversation, not get lectured at and told what to think.  The worst representatives actually yelled at their own constituencies to “shut up and listen“.  Ah, irony.

I saw this same pattern at a recent ecommerce conference in Las Vegas.  Each morning had the usualy Big Name Keynote address which was just as much show-n-tell as it was informative, but then the afternoon sessions consisted of smaller breakout sessions with a small (3-4 people) “panel of experts” sitting at the front of a long ballroom pontificating about some facet of ecommerce chellenges (customer usability, mobile commerce, social networks, etc.).  Here’s the thing– very few people actually listened, I think.  Most people had their heads down checking their email, tweeting out what they were hearing in the meeting, or even tweeting out how they’re not getting anything out of the meeting about how to use Twitter.  Ah, irony.

On the flight home, I downshifted with a Newsweek magazine, and saw an article about the Emmy Awards for TV, and how the awards shows seem increasingly out of touch with the will of the people.  “That makes sense,” I thought to myself: awards shows depend on panels of experts, and that model is becoming increasingly flawed.  Anything that is perceived as a one-way street of information transfer, or has a significant amount of time-lag between the chosen opinion coming down from above and the feedback going back up will lose attention with an increasingly twitchy, real-time community.

So what to do?  Here’s some cheap shots:

• For political town halls, obviously not everyone can talk, and even then not everyone has a cogent thought, but everyone wants to participate.  What if everyone was handed a chit or poker chip as they came into the room, and each person could either ask their friends for their chips because she wants to speak, or she could hand her poker chip to someone she trusts to voice her opinion.  The microphone would then be ‘auctioned off’ to those with the most poker chips, and passed around as time allowed.
• For conference meetings, the panels must absolutely integrate real-time tweets, polls, and feedback.  As topics become more tightly defined, the likelihood that smarter people are sitting out in the audience increases.  The poker chips might work here as well.
• For awards shows– I have no remedy.  They really were just a money-scam from the Big Studio era anyway, it seems, to put butts in seats a second time in November, while allowing actors to negotiate higher salaries because they had won something.  With the social networks, rotten tomatoes, and Mr Dynamite, we all have sufficient information to judge they good films, music, and TV from the dreck.  Those that cannot discern quality content deserve what they get.