Conferences that Work

MAY 13, 2024

Then the other day, I was flipping through Jerry Weinberg ‘s book “ Weinberg on Writing – The Fieldstone Method “ I remembered what Gabriele Rico , author of the best-selling “ Writing the Natural Way “, called “ One of the best lines of Weinberg on Writing, and one every writer should commit to memory.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 1, 2024

On Tuesday, March 26, 2024 , I sat down with Martin Duffy and Paul Nunesdea on LinkedIn Live for an hour’s deep dive conversation about peer conferences: the participant-driven, participation-rich events I’ve designed and facilitated for over thirty years. Peer Conferences Unveiled—The Transcript! Here it is—enjoy!

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Conferences that Work

MAY 20, 2024

Improving Conferences That Work I designed and facilitated my first peer conference in 1992. I ran them in my spare time for thirteen years before writing my first book. Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love took four years to write. When it was published in 2009, my peer conference work exploded.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 5, 2024

Community versus audience I began my first book with the research finding (and common observation) that people go to conferences to network and learn. My later books (and many posts on this site) have emphasized the superiority of active over passive learning. But, all too often, attendees are not the conference owners.

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Smart Meetings

JUNE 9, 2023

For hoteliers, AI and other event productivity technology can help remove friction and pain points in booking and checking in, but the goal is to relieve employees of mundane tasks so they can focus more on human interactions, explained Ben Space, vice president and commercial director Americas managed with Hilton. “We

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Conferences that Work

JULY 17, 2023

I am resigned to the fact that OpenAI ‘s Large Language Model ChatGPT has scraped every blog post I’ve written here (over 750 posts in the last 13 years—around half a million words) so it can parrot my thoughts about meeting design, facilitation, and other topics. I don’t think so.

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Conferences that Work

JANUARY 11, 2021

What makes attending conferences worthwhile? As I described in Conferences That Work , the two most common reasons for attending conferences are to learn useful things and make useful connections. But there are numerous other ways that conferences provide value to stakeholders. Complicated problems.

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Conferences that Work

SEPTEMBER 13, 2021

If you do this, using Google Books Ngram Viewer , you’ll notice a curious thing. In 1804, the earliest year included in the Google Books database, the word interaction barely appears. Society, as reflected by books in English, now talks about interaction about twice as often as presentation. That was half a century ago.

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Conferences that Work

SEPTEMBER 26, 2022

Software testers do peer conferences right! They even call them a peer conference , rather than unconference , a term I don’t like.) As evidence of software tester conference awesomeness, I offer three examples below. a short history of the peer conference. The 2022 SoCraTes peer conference. But first…. …a

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Conferences that Work

JUNE 3, 2019

The first peer conference I convened and designed was held June 3 – 5, 1992 at Marlboro College, Vermont. So, as of today, the community of practice that eventually became edACCESS has enjoyed 27 years of peer conferences. Twenty-three people came to the inaugural conference. 27 years of peer conferences.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 12, 2024

For over thirty years I’ve been making clients’ conferences significantly better, for about the cost of a conference coffee break. I make conferences better by dramatically increasing attendee satisfaction. Since 1992, I’ve designed and facilitated hundreds of conferences and thousands of meetings.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 18, 2022

The first novel hybrid meeting format was invented by Joel Backon back in 2010. The second is a design I’ll be using in a conference I’ve designed and will be facilitating in June 2022. Collaborative Tools Workshop ” designed by Joel Backon at the 2010 annual edACCESS conference.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 20, 2023

07:45 Behind the scenes: How I got into designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich meetings. 11:00 What participant-driven and participation-rich meeting design means, and the core components. 13:45 Creating a conference program on the fly at the event. 03:30 How Anca and I met.

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Conferences that Work

JUNE 7, 2021

Why am I writing about social learning on a blog that’s (mainly) about meeting design? Because social (uncovered) learning is the best learning model for conference sessions. Which means, to create the best meetings we need to maximize the social learning that takes place. Humans’ true superpower.

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Conferences that Work

JULY 24, 2017

So you’re holding a conference. Read the full article at Conferences That Work. The Solution Room—a powerful conference session There’s been a lot of interest in The Solution Room, a session that I co-facilitated last July at Meeting Professionals International World Education Congress in Orlando, Florida.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 1, 2019

This (slightly edited) interview by JT Long appeared in the March 2019 issue of Smart Meetings Magazine. What led to writing the book, Conferences that Work ? I invented the format by accident 26 years ago when there were no expert speakers to invite for a conference on administrative computing issues in small schools.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 20, 2017

And yes, I admit it, during the second day of my vacation while enjoying the harmonies I hear, I’m jolted to think about religious meeting design…. Religious services are thought to be around 300,000 years old — by far the oldest form of organized meeting that humans have created. Keep ’em moving!

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Conferences that Work

DECEMBER 16, 2019

If you had told me forty years ago, a freshly minted high-energy particle physics postdoc, that I’d go on to have four additional careers (owner of a solar manufacturing business, computer science professor, independent IT consultant, and meeting designer/facilitator) I wouldn’t have believed you. I recommend you hire them!

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Conferences that Work

MAY 11, 2020

I’ve been designing and facilitating participant-driven and participation-rich in person meetings — aka peer conferences — for almost thirty years. Because participants love these meetings ! Now the covid-19 pandemic has forced meetings online. In person meetings have vanished overnight.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 5, 2021

Only about 10% of adult learning involves formal classroom or meeting presentation formats. Unfortunately, traditional conferences are poor places for this kind of learning to occur, since they’re filled with broadcast-style lectures, during which no interpersonal interaction takes place. No related posts.

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Conferences that Work

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

But I’m a consultant who has long subscribed to Jerry Weinberg’s Seventh Law of Marketing : “Give away your best ideas” and Credit Rule : “You’ll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit”, from his invaluable book The Secrets of Consulting. ” “Stop. No related posts.

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Conferences that Work

SEPTEMBER 11, 2023

Events and media consultant Julius Solaris shared at the Unforgettable Experience Design Summit that he was initially very enthusiastic about unconference format events. He thought conferences would eventually adopt unconference models. The solution to this is to design your unconference before choosing the venue.

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Conferences that Work

OCTOBER 11, 2021

And so it goes with meetings. Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, wrote a long book about this. It’s why businesses sponsor meetings. It’s why we judge meeting experiences largely based on how they were perceived at their peak and at their end. Institutions. No related posts.

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 14, 2022

Personal meetings like these, whether brief or extended, between good friends or strangers, are fundamental. Someone to tell it to at conferences. Conferences, whether in-person or online, are also potential arenas for conversations. But some conferences offer better opportunities than others. No related posts.

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Conferences that Work

JULY 3, 2023

Back in 1992 , I developed The Three Questions as a fundamental opening process for participant-driven meetings and conferences. Answering it gives every person present, in turn, an opportunity to share what they would like the ensuing meeting to be about. Those who offer it are usually first-time attendees.

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 15, 2021

Recently, I’ve been appearing as a guest at college event planning and hospitality courses to talk about meeting design. (I Rather than lecture for an hour, I’ve been using an Ask Me Anything (aka AMA ) meeting format. Related posts: Ask Me Anything About Conference Panels — Thursday, July 21, 4-6 pm EDT Blab!

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Conferences that Work

JULY 31, 2017

Although I have good reasons to champion meeting designs where the participants get to choose what they want and need to discuss and learn rather than a program committee , there is invariably a place for some predetermined presentations at conferences. Read the full article at Conferences That Work.

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Conferences that Work

NOVEMBER 8, 2021

” I think it’s reasonable to concentrate on fairness to participants : the majority of those involved with the meeting. In his influential 1971 book A Theory of Justice , John suggested that “the fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have.”.

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Travel Daily Media

JULY 5, 2023

The post IHG Hotels & Resorts launch ‘Meet How You Meet,’ across SE Asia, Korea, Australasia and Japan appeared first on TD (Travel Daily Media) Travel Daily.

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Conferences that Work

JANUARY 24, 2022

But I see meetings where hallway learning trumps a majority of, if not all, conference sessions as failures of design, rather than a fact of life. There are many different formats you can use for such conversations (described in detail in my books ): pair and trio share, facilitated small group breakouts, fishbowls, etc.

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 13, 2017

This is all very well, but it begs the question: what can meeting designers do to make it easier for attendees to participate more at meetings? Read the full article at Conferences That Work. Here are three things we can do.

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Conferences that Work

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

For a full explanation of why active learning modalities are superior, see Chapter 4 of my book The Power of Participation.). Let’s look at these three conclusions in the context of meeting design. Most meeting presenters still lecture. So why do we continue to use broadcast-style formats?

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Conferences that Work

JUNE 4, 2018

When consulting, one of my biggest meeting design challenges is to get boss buy-in. To improve the relevance and effectiveness of social structures, organizations, and meetings, it’s crucial for leaders to understand and accept the potential and value of decentralized influence.

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Conferences that Work

MARCH 29, 2021

People have written books about how to do this. If you had told me then that I’d leave that career (my fourth) to write a book about meeting design that would catapult me into the heart of the meeting industry, I’d have said you were crazy. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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The MICE Blog

MARCH 11, 2021

A common example is booking websites. The gamification strategies on these websites endeavour to make us book as soon as possible. It’s not about fun but to make us book.’. We used meeting design to do that, which already had some gamification elements to it. Gamifying a conference – ShipCon case study.

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Conferences that Work

JUNE 26, 2017

You see this in the increasing number of industry articles about good meeting process, the rise of the term “meeting design” being applied to the group process we use in sessions as opposed to, say, F&B or production design. Read the full article at Conferences That Work. What’s Next.

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Conferences that Work

APRIL 8, 2019

1992: I organize a conference where there are no expert speakers available (it’s a new field, there are no experts). Invent a way to make the conference successful based on the collective needs, wants, and experience of the attendees. The conference has run continually for the last 27 years.) This is something new.

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