That said….

I just returned from TED. Sure, it's "organized" – but the most important part of the organization is what happens spontaneously among individuals during breaks, meals, and off-time. TED is more or less the "excuse" for people of great passion – positive social influencers – to gather once a year and build ideas non-stop for 4 days.

The connections made at TED, thanks in part to its particular vertical structure, do synergize and cause great world change. Not that BIL doesn't bring change…

Bottom line – there's a place for both kinds of structures (along a continuum). I'm the biggest fan of ventures like BIL, but it's simply not going to replace the kind of focus I'm looking for at TED. Ideologically, BIL and TED are in fact very close together.

archist and anarchist methodologies yield different results. The
overlap between conferences in time and space is slight, and appears
to be an attempt at synergy rather than competition.

The hierarchy of TED ensures quality and focus. An un-conference can
only achieve that through luck or quality of attendees (again
elitism). So, while TED is indeed bounded by the vision of it's own
hierarchy, and limited slightly by the financial elitism, it remains a
fantastic edge zone for sharing inter-disciplinary ideas. The TED
price tag works as a way to limit attendance to something manageable,
and a good chunk of those funds go to the TED Prize good-niks, and by
making the videos available to everyone for free, goes a long way
towards counteracting the elitism of the conference itself. Indeed
they're planning to increase the rate of releases to a new video every
day this year!

BIL would not exist without 25 years of TED demonstrating the power of
interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and the enlightened self-interest
that came from disseminating their videos for free instead of trying
to make more revenue off the conference. The "organizers" of BIL seem to
acknowledge that.

Similarly, TED appears to recognize the value that can come from a more
egalitarian version of their conference. BIL has a strong potential
for "outside the box" ideas, which over time will positively influence
the TED crowd. The slight overlap is overtly intended to allow
interested TED attendees to pop into BIL and get a taste of both
worlds. Shame on you for suggesting otherwise.

essentially the un-conference.

attended one in vancouver last summer
http://2007.newformsfestival.com/artcamp/index.php/Participants

the way it worked: there's a whiteboard with time slots; if you're interested in talking about something, sign up for a time and a room. bring your laptop, plug into the projector, and do your presentation, with realtime Q&A, etc.

i must say that i thought it worked very well as a system. the people who were there (and this was on a sunny saturday in august in vancouver) really wanted to be there and were truly interested in getting provocative ideas out there, hearing what others had to say, etc.

so this takes the idea of the best things that happen at conferences happens in the hallways (i think that was the Idea City line) and puts the best things back into rooms, but allows the best things to self-organize and self-define.

PS shouldn't your post have been called BIL vs TED's excellent adventure?