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What is Gel?

Short for "Good Experience Live", Gel is a conference and community exploring good experience in all its forms - in art, business, technology, society, and life.

Gel was founded by Mark Hurst in 2003 and has run a spring event in New York City each year since. Gel 2011 was the 9th annual event. (Hurst has also run two spinoff events, Gel Health in 2009 and euroGel in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006. See past Gels.)

Instead of focusing on just one thing - design, technology, user experience, business - like many conferences, Gel brings together ideas, experiences, and thought leaders from many disciplines. Participants are invited to find the common patterns, even in areas vastly different from their own.

Past Gel speakers include This American Life's Ira Glass, Harlem Children's Zone founder Geoffrey Canada, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, nutritionist Marion Nestle, author Clay Shirky, and The Flying Karamazov Brothers.

Gel is also known for finding new voices and putting them on a major conference stage for the first time. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, performance artist Ze Frank, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan, lexicographer Erin McKean, prankster Charlie Todd, Google's VP of consumer products Marissa Mayer, photographer Chris Jordan, inventor Theo Jansen, and many others debuted at Gel before speaking at other top events.

The best way to understand the Gel experience is to attend. (Most recent event was Gel 2011.) You might also like to watch videos from Gel 2011 to get a sense of the caliber and range of speakers - though attendees have said that the videos don't fully describe the Gel experience.

Attendees

The Gel community is primarily made up of creative leaders from a range of disciplines and industries. See the Gel 2011 attendee list to get a sense of this range.

When asked to describe Gel in their own words, attendees offered comments like these:

• "Gel gathers a fascinating group of innovative and energetic individuals who are trailblazers in their respective fields."
• "Gel is unexpectedly extremely relevant to how I approach my everyday job."
• "Gel is unlike any other conference you will ever attend. It won't tell you how to improve your business or life, but it will expand your horizons enough so you can do it on your own."
• "By far, the best conference I have ever attended."

Gel structure

Gel is designed to be an environment where attendees can explore a diverse set of themes and ideas through a series of meaningful, engaging, and thought-provoking experiences.

The conference takes place across three days:

• Day 1 leads off with an on-stage welcome session, followed by a full day of experiences outside the theater - tours, seminars, workshops, and field trips held all across New York City.
• Day 2 is the "theater day," when attendees convene in the TimesCenter theater as more than a dozen speakers present on-stage. (The standard presentation is between 15 and 20 minutes long.)
• Day 3 ran for the first time at Gel 2011 as Gel Saturday: a morning of events for attendees to connect with each other and further explore the themes of the event. (See detailed schedule.)

Sponsorship

Gel is an exclusive environment for sponsors, with typically just one or two companies accepted into the sponsor list. Past sponsors include Google, Microsoft, Sanofi-Aventis, and The Ladders. And we were happy to welcome Carbonite as lead sponsor of Gel 2011.

For more info, see sponsorship opportunities.

Gel is a barn raising

The Wikipedia entry on barn raising notes that "participation is mandatory for community members." Similarly, Gel invites attendees to participate actively throughout the three-day experience - arriving for the beginning and staying to the end.

What's more, everyone invests something to be at Gel - time, money, or effort. This helps make the event more cohesive for everyone who is there. Therefore...

The easiest way to be at Gel is to buy a ticket. This helps defray the considerable costs of putting on the event (and puts you in the running for stage prize drawings!).

Journalists are very welcome to attend Gel by buying a ticket and participating in the event as an attendee. For journalists seeking a free ticket, we unfortunately can't accommodate the request.

Students and others who can't foot the cost of a ticket are welcome to apply to our volunteer team - contact us. Note that volunteer slots typically fill up several months in advance of the event.

Hope to see you at Gel - you're invited!

Most recent event: Gel 2011