General Comments: Clinton Global Initiative

The Clinton Global Initiative is a medium size conference with around 800 people. Davos for example has around 3000 people. The Aspen Brainstorm, still the best conference I ever attended, 300 people. I would venture to say the CGI has managed to attain the perfect conference size. Still, they are not managing people well. At this conference there´s a remarkable gathering of people, many of whom have something to say but are not getting the chance. In this, Davos is more efficient. In my view it is better to have more sessions, more choices. Here there are around 10 sessions per day for 800 people. At Davos there are 60 sessions a day for 3000 people. So at Davos they have 4 times the number of people but 6 times the number of sessions. Sessions here are too large and don´t give an opportunity to the very smart people who attend to contribute and interact as much. Also having more sessions is an opportunity for people who attend the conference over the internet, through bloggers or through the press, to go directly to the topics of interest to them. These places are like Congress – many times speeches are made for the whole country and not necessarily for other members of Congress. Ideally though, you don´t want long and uninterrupted speeches, you want instead small sessions where speakers to shift from propaganda mode to a more honest Q&A session.

There´s another problem in the CGI format and that is that people are supposed to stay on the same tables throughout the day. I didn´t. I changed. You come to conferences like this to interact briefly with people who seem interesting to you so you can deepen the relationship outside of the conference. CGI´s system connects you too much with people at your table and little with anyone else. So, I switched tables so I could go to three tables in one day and cover a bit more ground.

• Aspen Brainstorm
• Clinton Global Initiative
• conferences
• Davos