search c[h]amps: striking a balance

I'm in the midst of another Search Champ meeting at Microsoft, and this one has taken a very different form from the first two. They listened to our feedback from the earlier meetings, in which we complained about (a) the fact that we were too diverse a group covering too many topics in too short a time, and (b) the highly structured, powerpoint driven, classroom style format.

This time we've got a small (nine people) group of blog-focused "champs," and a very unstructured day in a couch-filled room with a few key discussion topics. Seem like a winning formula.

But...

It turns out that if you put a bunch of opinionated geeks in a room, they spend a lot of time talking over each other. And there's definitely a gender divide in this behavior. (Also a newcomer versus returnee divide--the people who haven't attended a search champ event before appear significantly less willing to shout to be heard.)

There's clearly a balance that needs to be struck, and it's one that I'm well familiar with from classroom settings. One-to-many, top-down, bullet-point-driven meetings are stultifying; free-for-all discussions end up marginalizing those unwilling to jump into the fray, and a lot of valuable things don't get said. (Plus I've got a killer headache from people who seem to share my 11-year-old's sense of what the appropriate decibel level for a small room is.)

All in all, I prefer the freewheeling to the overly structured, in large part because I'm one of those people willing to jump in, speak loudly, and demand attention when I feel I've got something important to say. But neither extreme is ideal, and my hope is that MSN will keep learning from these meetings, and find a happier medium for future meetings.