First, record everything. Have audio recorders running in all meetings. Buy cheap video cameras and tripods and have volunteers or staff record the sessions, preferably from more than one angle. Take video and still cams to the hallway conversations, the parties, the whiteboards. Designate scribes to take detailed, almost verbatim notes of every meeting. Use screen-capture software to record demonstrations and presentations. Get it all.

Second, push it out. Stream live where you can and publish the rest. Fast. Continuously. Create an event blog and push all your collected media out the door. Video, audio, notes, sample code, documents, presentation files. Copy photos to flickr, vids to GoogleVideo and YouTube. Be sure to configure your blog for podcasting and vlogging. Make your media feeds available through iTunes.

Third, add context. In the blog posts, add your commentary, point to the highlights, tag your entries, describe the rich media, make sense of it all, distill the meaning, make the links.

Fourth, get those outside the room to participate. Before the event: invite comments on blog posts, start and promote an IRC channel, set up a listserv. During the event, project the latest IRC backchannel and comment RSS on the walls. Designate someone in the room to act as voice for the IRC people to ask questions of those in the room.

This may feel like transparency overload. But the benefit to 99% of your developers, the loyalty and engagement it promotes, the choices it drives, are huge. Enormous. Overwhelmingly important. Nobody gets there by sharing only 1% of what happens in those vivid sessions through carefully edited newsletters or moderated conference calls. You have the great fortune of intellectual and emotional intensity for a few days. Yet without these four steps you lose nearly all of it when the event ends. You're abandoning the real payoff.

Work for second-order effects. Look to these events as meme generators. Do everything you can to spread the new knowledge and ideas and discussion threads while they are fresh and hot and personal. Your audience is more than the 25-100 people in the room. It's the 10,000 people who are or who should be part of Skype's ecosystem.

eBay made this mistake at the June 2006 eBayDevCon. Only the keynotes are recorded on video and they weren't published to the web live or at all. And none of the breakout sessions are on vid or audio. So Skype and eBay and PayPal flew people from around the world to present each topic to 15-40 people. Yet they could have used that precious interaction as the foundation for reaching the thousands who could not be at that place at that time.

I heard someone on the eBay PR team say they didn't want to tip their hands to the competition by sharing the eBay DevCon and eBay Live sessions too widely. Utter blatfarb. No earth shattering secret is ever shared at these events. Hoarding knowledge and information starves your ecosystem, your partners, your community. Hoarding erodes trust and further investment. It reinforces the notion that Skype works best if you're an "insider" and you must have an inside connection to partner with Skype. This is another path; I hope Skype and others choose it for future events.