Conference: how-to from one without any experience

I have been desk-bound in the last two years, travelling little and attended only a handful of conferences. However, Fablusi is helping to organise the LOW2 conference in Melbourne here in November (OK Roni does all the work!). So I have been thinking why, in this increasingly online environment, we still want to meet face to face?

Good food and wine, relaxing in a different city, away from daily work and having a holiday paid by your employer are good reasons enough to justify attending conference.

As organiser, we need to think how to create a rewarding conference experience for the participants. Here are a few suggestions:

[ideas from Ausweb]

Host in a nice resort in the East coast of Australia. Always start on Saturday with workshops. Formally start on Sunday afternoon with conference BBQ. Conference dinner in the first full conference night.

Group papers, as most conferences do. Allow only up to 15 minutes presentation and devote a great part of the time for discussion.

Publish papers online before hand. Ask participants to read before attending presentation.

I.e. try to maximize the benefits of having face to face interactions.

[technology support]

Some years ago, I have stolen the idea from Marie Jasinski, to run an email game before the one-day meeting ( National Summit on Online Role Play held in October 2002) in order to arrive at an agreed statement about the reason why we used role play simulation*.

Program published as a wiki. "This means that every session is open for comments, extensions and even revisions by our attendees." [idea from Learning TRENDS #366]

Run a collaborative editing session at the same time for keeping a record of the discussion.

Make a recording and make the audio and presentation files available online later. (see IT Conversations)

Encourage blogging.

[Program format]

Long program with lots of empty time slots in-between. For example, frequent and long coffee breaks and long lunch break.

Do not allow people movement during sessions. I.e. do not encourage people to leave a discussion in the middle. Consider that this is rude to the other participants.

[Conference environment]

Try to get as many participants as possible to stay in the same place. Hence, they will start their day at Breakfast and finish after the pub.

Wireless 24-hour fast Internet access a MUST.

Plenty of small tables, comfortable seats with nearby power points, supplied with plenty of drinking water, pencils and blank papers.

One more killer tool, which we shall implement during LOW2, which meant to be a secret is (don't tell the LOW2 participants yet.)

Run the conference in parallel with a virtual conference where the participants take on another persona. That is, our participants are attending TWO conferences at the same time.

*The final wordings we agreed after the email game is:

We use online role play because it encourages deep approaches to learning through safe, yet challenging, explorations of perspectives.

- Online Role-Play Expert Reference Group

Tags: conference