Social media participation: what if no-one comes?

I come all this way to California for a Berkman/Annenberg conference on media and social participation and the first main speaker is a Brit. Worse still, it’s Richard Sambrook, Global News Director at the BBC (and a very good media blogger). Richard has been very kind about my new book and we tend to agree about Networked Journalism so I wasn’t likely to hear anything I disagreed with or hadn’t heard before. He gave a superb precis of where we are at and the questions we are facing. But what was interesting were the elephants that then strolled in to the room.