When I started working on OmFest, there were already a lot of ideas. Matt had written beautifully about Om Malik, the many worlds he moved through, and how he envisioned what OmFest could become. He shared the form responses from Om’s friends and community with me, and I started reading Om’s blog, following references, finding objects, people, places, and stories. Very quickly, I had a lot of material.
I started building it into a deck, mapping out what I was learning and imagining how some of it could come to life at the event. I knew the project was only going to get bigger from there: more ideas, more people, more possibilities, and a lot of decisions.
I needed something to guide me through all of them. Something I could keep coming back to as we built the day, to make sure we weren’t losing sight of what OmFest was supposed to feel like or why we were doing it in the first place.
So early in the process, I took what I was learning from Om’s writing and from the people who knew him and turned it into five core principles for OmFest. They became my filter for almost every decision that followed.
- Leave knowing something you didn’t know before. (ref)
- “Bring value to the attendee with the highest possible editorial quality.”
- Om would attend conferences to learn, hoping he’d be smarter at the end of the day.
- Look closely at the present to see what is coming. Every conversation should start with what is happening now that the rest of us aren’t paying enough attention to (ref).
- Connection! At OmFest, we create useful collisions between Om’s worlds; we should design for new connections, not just document old ones.
- Outcome of OmFest – people make connections that Om never got the chance to make himself.
- Curiosity over celebrity.
- Make room for discovery, slowness, and joy.
Over the next 59 days, I’m going to write the stories behind how all of the pieces came together – the research, ideas, people, designs, rabbit holes, mistakes, and tiny details that eventually became OmFest on September 29.
Post 1 of 60 · Making OmFest