I have the great fortune to be involved in planning the Boston spin-off of Public Media Camp with a number of people from the Boston media community. It is an interesting process and has probably taught me more about media policy, institutional politics, and event planning than I'd ever want to know, but a couple key things stand out:
  1. Distributed communication is a challenge, fraught with false starts and misunderstandings. While this is certainly a social problem, there isn't much technology out there to help manage event planning sanely. Nothing beats a face-to-face meeting.
  2. Money is both the hard part and the easy part.
  3. Back-channels are essential.