Dispatches from Boston Fintech Week 2023 – Day 2
This post for all readers, takes a break from the public peer-review process for the book titled “Making Good Decisions”, to provide a man-on-the-ground dispatch about Day 2 of Boston Fintech Week 2003.
Following-up on the earlier dispatches for Day 0, and Day 1, this dispatch on Day 2 of Boston Fintech Week documents personal observations about the closing day of the ticketed program.
This last day of the ticketed program ended having food & drinks with energized Millennials building businesses, and talking about the disappearance of the Boomers that came before them. Their concern: How can we learn what they know before it is too late?
This came as a surprise.
On the other hand, given Marshall McLuhan’s quip “The Medium is the Message”, and looking at the structure of Boston Fintech Week as a McLuhan “Medium”, it should have been the expected. The structure of Boston Fintech Week turns participants into self-directed hunter-gatherers, instead of a corralled herd of sheep.
At Boston Fintech Week, the Main Stage becomes the networking area instead of the usual theater stage for the predictable conference routines. Unlike traditional conference attendees, Boston Fintech Week makes us all participants in building content above and beyond what speakers can provide. Boston Fintech Week does not have passive attendees seeking ex-cathedra pronouncements, it has active participants creating their own future.
Participants come from locals that live in Boston, or commute to Boston. They also come from travelers that arrive at Logan to stay in downtown hotels in order to take advantage of the unique structure of Boston Fintech Week: An embodied conference of conferences at the scale of a walkable City, and over the course of an entire week.
During the course of the week, participants create their own experience by walking from place-to-place/event-to-event, using the building of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston as the home base between several core areas that include:
- Boston’s Financial District, anchored around Post Office Square,
- Boston’s South Station area, and
- Boston’s Seaport Neighborhood, anchored around the Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center.
Occasionally, some events take place in areas that may be too far to walk comfortably, thus running against the grain of the event, including:
- Cambridge’s Kendall Square, and places beyond, as well as
- Boston’s BackBay.
The skill of the organizers comes from balancing events across subject matter, space and time so that participants can create a customized schedule that walks them, with time to spare, from one place to another, and in their areas of interest. For instance, some will work in their office in the morning, go to the Fed by mid-day, and then walk to one or more events for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Boston’s unique walkability makes this a very civilized experience, New England weather permitting, of course.
Coming back to the closing party with Millennials, this years’ photo booth, and the security procedures at each event location showed a visible departure from the past, a form of tribalization based on having a magic wand (e.g. A smart phone), and knowing specific magic incantations (e.g. QR Codes). In earlier years, we just walked in most places and events with a single point of control at an event table in the lobby. This year brought multi-stage security starting with remote vetting by RSVP, late disclosure of event location, etc. The photo booth didn’t even ask for your name - face recognition and all. Not sure what to make of this yet, but thinking about it in the context of a McLuhan “Tetrad”, I wonder how the future will answer its four questions, its four “Laws of Media”, and to paraphrase:
- What has intensified, became amplified, or enhanced?
- What become retrieved from the past?
- What reverses, of flips at scale?
- What became displaced, obsolesced, or returned to the past?
This will make good fodder from next year’s discussions.
Come to think about it, this may even lead to a suggestion for next year’s program. Given the observation that the networking area provides Boston Fintech Week’s real Main Stage, I wonder if it would make sense to implement events along the lines of Jim O’Shaughnessy’s original “Kohler Conference” where the audience becomes the speakers, and all event participants give a 3 to 5 minutes speech in rapid fire succession. This format made “Kohler” the best conference in the Defined Contribution Industry because speaking for such a short amount of time requires careful thing (e.g. “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”, Blaise Pascal 1657, and all.), and this mutual exposure to real-life experience, concerns, and solutions turbo-charged the value of the networking.
Tomorrow’s post will recap, and compare these Dispatches for BFW 2023 with their 2018, and 2019 versions.
Developing…
“CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a book in three volumes, published at the rate of one two-pages section per day on Substack for public peer-review. The book connects the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, & continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, & Statistics (i.e. AI/ML/LLM) research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.