Dave Winer and the Gnomedex Incident

Ok, I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but my ability to resist has faded.

At Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex event earlier this month there was an incident where a presenter, Jason Calacanis, basically got heckled quite aggressively by Dave Winer. Evidently there was some content in Jason’s presentation that he didn’t like, and he chose to deal with it by acting wholly unprofessional.

So, no big deal, right? Things got a bit out of hand with the comments and Dave apologizes and it’s over, right? Uh, no. What happened instead is Dave Winer proceeded to go on a campaign to justify his actions — in public. Here’s how it started with Dave blogging from the conference during Jason’s talk:

Calanis is ranting about marketers are intruding on the Internet. But explain to me how what he’s doing is not an ad. Bold hypocrisy. He’s spamming us right now. What a joke.

Keep in mind that Jason is someone he called a friend. Jason’s response is taken by Dave as nasty and personal, but it’s nothing of the sort. He’s basically just trying to decipher why Dave acted the way he did. Jason writes later:

I’m sad, but somewhat relieved, that Dave told me our friendship is over. He informed me of this in his third berating session of me in 24 hours, this time at the end of lunch. I’m not interested in having someone berate me like this, and I’m certainly not interested in having him berate people at the TechCrunch20 conference. If I made a mistake yesterday and was too promotional for the tone of the event I’m sorry as I explained above (right now i’ve have ~40 folks tell me I did a great job, and two including Dave say it was too promotional). Good luck to you Dave, it was nice spending time with you over the past couple of years.

The whole way through Jason has been classy about this. He had permission to do his talk, most people liked it, and Dave just went ape-shit and ruined a friendship over thinking someone’s presentation was too marketing-oriented.

But it doesn’t stop there, and THIS is why I’m even writing about it. Dave simply can’t leave it alone. First he appears to be doing the right thing by apologizing, but then he goes right back into his old form with a post titled “If Jason Were a Mensch”.

If Jason were a man? That’s the title of his blog post? Is this guy not aware of how is actions affect others? In the post he goes on to describe how exactly he’d like Jason to apologize to him and others. Utterly remarkable.

But he’s not done. Today he critiqued Gnomedex itself — essentially justifying why he said he won’t be going back next year.

If Gnomedex is to continue, it must get back on track, it must reflect our interests, the audience’s interests. Chris is a great entertainer, and a warm human being, but his vision of the political and economic future is not something I share, or would find interesting to discuss. Chris may choose to run a conference about his political views, but I have a choice too, when I go to political conferences, they reflect my interests. I go to Gnomedex to meet other bloggers and discuss what’s happening in the blogosphere. It shouldn’t be hard to program that, we can help, if asked.

How nice. He offered to help change Gnomedex into something less like Chris wants and more like Dave wants.

I’ve been talking to Chris off and on during the whole thing and he’s been very mature by staying out of it. It’ll be interesting to see what he says if and when he finally does comment.

So anyway, I just wanted to sort of map out how one observer saw things happen and let Dave know that it’s quite evident in the blogsphere how things really went down.

Dave’s an icon in the field and many can benefit from his input. It’d be a shame for him to develop a reputation that keeps this from happening as much as it should.: