1.	There are two types of sessions other than the plenaries, those that require a reservation and those that don't. It's not clear how they decide which require a reservation. The one that I participated in on Thursday, 10 Websites that Will Change the World, did not require a reservation, but the room was full fifteen minutes before the session started. I assume they don't require reservations if the management believes they will not be full.
2.	Many, if not most of the sessions do require a reservation, for the simple reason that the rooms hold as few as 100 people, and 2000+ people attend Davos. So if you want to hear Umberto Eco talk, you have to be quick, and probably lucky. But the cool thing about Davos, that's echoed (no pun) through the structure of the show is that knowing someone does you no good. The rich, powerful and famous queue up with the rest of us coming back into the meeting hall after lunch. This is one of the things I like best about Davos, like all good conferences, they seem to have low tolerance for crybabies. Another aside, on the first day of the show the Wall Street Journal ran a page one story saying the opposite, that the Davos management was for sale. I don't believe it. It's run by academics with high principles. I would depend on their honesty, certainly until I see evidence to the contrary, and unlike other conferences that play favorites, this one really is first-come-first-serve.
3.	Also, I think your experience is what you make of it. Each session is pretty open to the participants, and what happens depends largely on who shows up. There's something very rich going on here. We all feel honored to be here, with some exceptions, mostly Silicon Valley people who bring their bad manners with them, that's why I stopped going to software industry conferences. When I mentioned this to Lance Knobel earlier this evening he asked about Esther. Oh Esther! She's the total exception. She's like a little girl, bopping around making faces, and sewing clothes in the back of a meeting room. This is Happy Esther, we could all learn something from her -- why bother being superior? One famous Silicon Valley personality I ran into told me how clueless the people at Davos are. I wanted to ask him why he bothered coming.
4.	I came to a different conclusion.The people at Davos are thirsty to know. There are a lot of things they don't understand, but the spirit of Davos is Ask! Every time I asked for help I got smothered with it. And it's the cheerful sort of Let's Figure This Out kind of help, not the Oh You Don't Know So You're Not Cool kind of help. I would say Davos, while it's structure is daunting to the newbie, is a total newbie oriented thing. Silicon Valley could learn a thing or two from Davos.
5.	After doing the opening day session about the web, people have been asking me to explain how the web works, and the various discussions have lead to explanations of how ISPs work and DNS and email, how they relate, and how they don't relate. One wife-of-a-CEO said that for a few weeks she couldn't get thru to BlueMountainArts.Com, and wanted to know if Microsoft was responsible. I said I knew for a fact that Microsoft was not responsible. I think she believed me, but she didn't understand why.
6.	I'm totally rambling, but what the heck. I think the structure of the Internet is actually no more complex than the structure of Davos. But as far as I know there is no newbies guide to the Internet. When I get back to California perhaps we should start a project to do that. I wonder if InternetNewbies.Com is taken?