I’ve been thinking about this for a while.  With various news stories about companies cancelling their Christmas parties, or AIG getting a kicking for yet another expensive event, I’ve been wondering if more and more organisations are going to look to save costs by reducing the formality of their conferences.

As I’ve mentioned before, Julius (from the eventmanagerblog.com site) talks a lot on his site about how events are changing shape and style – but is the credit crisis going to push this even further (or faster).  The truth is that I don’t know.

A new event is taking place over at the Stanford Open Source Lab – a free, user generated conference about all things open source.  Now, this makes sense to me – the whole ‘open source’ thing and ‘user generated’ go hand in hand, but I just can’t believe that my role as an event manager is dead.  Some events – particularly business focused training and conference events will always need some aspects of management because the speakers (professional speakers or otherwise) aren’t going to want to be bothered with helping their delegates registration or worry whether the tea and coffee are being served.

I can honestly see event managers specialising in organising unconferences (or bar camps as they are known) even though the irony is they shouldn’t need organising…

But, back to my question… Will organisations use the credit crisis to cut costs and standards, by using the bar camp model in an effort to save money?  I think they might experiment with it (there is no better time than the present to save a bit of money) but I would urge them to still seek professional help, to make sure that they venues aren’t taking advantage, and that all of the health & safety, legal requirements and technical equipment is correctly arranged.

What do you think? Comments below or on the forum.