VRM 2008
VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties. VRM 2008 is an unconference, where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants rather than in advance of the event. Registration for VRM 2008 is free.
CRM systems until now have borne the full burden of relating with customers. VRM will provide customers with the means to bear some of that weight, and to help make markets work for both vendors and customers — in ways that don't require the former to "lock in" the latter.
Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) has grown out of the User Centric Community and is still part of it. Defined and advocated by Project VRM at Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, it is Berkman Fellow Doc Searls, who took the initiative and is still heading the project.