One of the things I noticed post Freeplay is the uniquely personal experience of conferences and festivals. Every one who attends the traces a unique path through the content, and as such it’s difficult to plan before the event what the ideal experience is and post the event figure out whether it hit those. The best you can do is to hope there’s enough interesting content that everyone finds something in their path that connects with them.
This year’s GCAP did that for me.
And disclaimer: as part of the board, I helped program it, but compared to something like Freeplay, my involvement was minimal.