Welcome : Conferences That Work

Are your events suffering from falling attendance, evaluations, or profits? Do you want to make your current in-person or online meeting "can't miss" better, even as more and more content becomes available online? Are you wondering how to successfully start a new conference? I can help!

I'll help you create engaging in-person and online conferences around the learning your attendees really want and need. Events designed to build meaningful, mutually beneficial connections between participants. Meetings that help people work smarter and generate the right personal and organizational action outcomes.

For over 25 years I've been designing and facilitating Conferences That Work: innovative, highly interactive, attendee-driven events that leverage attendees' expertise and experience to create just the conference that participants want and need. You can also include traditional plenary sessions for a meeting experience that will delight your attendees and stakeholders.

I consult on meeting design, facilitate entire conferences, individual sessions, and session crowdsourcing, present regularly about participant-led and participation-rich events, and lead interactive labs on design techniques that will fundamentally improve your meetings and conference sessions.

I facilitate three popular plenaries—The Solution Room, The Personal Introspective, and The Group Spective—that provide powerful opportunities for participants to learn, connect, engage, and reflect at your event.

I also specialize in designing and facilitating large group discussions on hot topics, using my unique Fishbowl Sandwich format.

I've written three books on meeting design.

— Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love condenses 30 years experience designing, organizing, and facilitating conferences into an information-packed step-by-step guide to proven designs for productive conferences that people love.

— The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action is a comprehensive guide to participation techniques that increase learning, connection, engagement, and outcomes at any conference session or event.

— Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need explains why event and session crowdsourcing is an essential strategy and practice for creating successful meetings, and teaches you in detail how to create meetings where attendees want, need, and love every session.

Contact me today to set up a consultation.

Recent Peer Conference Calendar Additions

25 Jul 2021 - 25 Jul 2021: Augment Minds 2021, online, in Gather Town.
Augment Minds 2021 brings together developers, designers, researchers, engineers, and educators in an effort to pave the way towards transformative tools for thought. Like any unconference, Augment Minds 2021 is participant-centric. Besides a few introductory lightning talks, the agenda is completely unknown prior to the actual event.
16 Sep 2021 - 17 Sep 2021: F# Europe, Online.
F# Europe is an online unconference. There is no upfront agenda: you and the other participants self-organise the sessions. We'll be using Hopin (interactive video platform), and Miro (collaborative whiteboarding). You can join sessions that are proposed by the other participants. Or you can propose your own sessions. You can do a programming session, using a tricky problem from your job. You can do a presentation, on a topic you’re passionate about, or a Questions & Answers session, or ... You don’t even need to know the topic in advance. “I’d like to learn about XYZ, who wants to explain it, or experiment with me?” is a perfectly valid session.
08 Oct 2021 - 10 Oct 2021: 2021 Women Veterans Unconference, Tropicana Resort, Las Vegas and online.
An unconference for the premier national network focused on directly impacting the quality of life of women veterans.

More upcoming events >>

From The Blog:

July 19, 2021

Hub and spoke meetings

Ever since my first encounter with the hybrid hub and spoke meeting topology at Event Camp Twin Cities in 2011, I’ve been a big fan of the format. Yesterday [see below], I realized that hub and spoke is a great format for purely online meetings too. But first…

…What’s a hub and spoke meeting?

A hub and spoke meeting is one where there’s a central hub meeting or event that additional groups (aka “pods”) of people join remotely.Hub and spoke is an event network topology. The hub event and each pod may be either in-person or online.

A terminology reminder
In-person meeting: participants are physically together.
Online meeting: participants are connected to each other via an internet platform like Zoom or Teams.
Hybrid meeting: A meeting with in-person and online components as defined above, plus additional forms explored below.

The benefits of hub and spoke

Increased learning, interaction, and connection

If you want maximum learning, interaction, and connection at a meeting, small meetings are better than large meetings. Using good meeting design, simply splitting a single large group of participants into multiple small groups in an intelligent way provides increased opportunities for each group’s members to connect and interact around relevant content.

Flexibility

Hub and spoke topology allows tremendous design flexibility for a meeting.

In-person pods can be set up at any convenient geographical location, reducing travel time and costs for pod participants while still providing the benefits of in-person interaction.

You can segment online pods to reflect specific “tribes”: groups of people with something in common. For example, think about a conference to explore the implications of a medical breakthrough. One pod could be for patient groups that the discovery will affect. Another might include medical personnel able to deliver the new technology or procedure. Yet another group could contain scientists working on next iterations. [A hat tip to Martin Sirk for suggesting this example!]

Creating pods that reflect event participant segments allow different communities’ goals and objectives to be optimally met while sharing with all participants a common body of learning and experiences via the hub.

Convenience

As noted above, using in-person pods can dramatically reduce the travel time and cost for event participants without sacrificing the benefits of meeting in-person. This allows more people to attend the hub and spoke meeting, and makes it easier for them to do so.

Hub and spoke variants

Depending on the choices made, a hub and spoke event will take one of the following forms:

In-person hub and in-person pods

This is the classic hybrid hub and spoke format that we used 10 years ago at Event Camp Twin Cities (ECTC).

Here’s a little information about the groundbreaking ECTC. Besides the attendees at the in-person hub event in Minneapolis, seven remote pods in Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Toronto, Vancouver, Silicon Valley and two corporate headquarters were tied in to a hub feed that—due to the technology available at the time—was delayed approximately twenty seconds. As you might expect, this delay led to a number of communication issues between the hub and pods. I wrote about ECTC in more detail here.

There will always be some communications delay between the hub and pods, though these days it can be reduced to a fraction of the delay at ECTC. Such delays should be taken into account when designing hub and spoke events.

Online pods

My recent experience of being in an online pod viewing an online hub event made me realize that online pods can be used to great effect with either in-person or online hub events.

Since February, 2021, my friend, tech producer, and meeting industry educator Brandt Krueger has been hosting weekly EventTech Chats on Zoom, together with another friend, his talented co-host, “The Voice of Events”, Glenn Thayer. Yesterday, Brandt was presenting at an MPI event on hybrid meetings, so Glenn shared the event so we could kibitz. Seven of us were in a Zoom, watching a Zoom…

I commented about the recursive nature of this…

On a small group Zoom, watching a meeting industry Zoom panel. (Kinda nice, as our group can comment in our Zoom on what we’re watching.) This could be extended.

Is there a Guinness World Record for the number of Zooms watching another Zoom watching another Zoom…? pic.twitter.com/rwNmQFFdWJ

— Adrian Segar (@ASegar) July 16, 2021

…and Anh Nguyen replied that the experience was like Inception. She also mentioned Giggl, which, in similar fashion, allows a group to interact (text and voice) on a shared internet portal. This could be useful if you don’t have a Zoom license.

Our pod experience

The MPI meeting had over 150 viewers. We noticed that there was little interaction on the MPI Zoom chat. Our little group was much more active on chat. We were a small group with a common set of interests, and we all knew each other to some extent.

It’s clear to me that we had a much more interactive, useful, and intimate discussion than the hub event group.

Yes, this is one anecdotal example. But I hope you can see how being in a small pod of connected folks can lead to a better experience than being one of many attending the same event at a hub.

The ease, with today’s technology, of creating an online pod with whomever you please to watch and comment on a hub event, makes this an attractive option to attending the hub event directly online. (If you wanted to, of course, you could do both—as Glenn Thayer did for our pod.)

In-person and online pods

Finally, there’s no reason why a hub event can’t support a mixture of in-person and online pods. (In fact, ECTC had a small number of individual remote viewers as well, though I suspect they could only watch the hub stream.) Once the hub stream is available, one can share it with an online pod, or on a large screen with an in-person pod. Mix and match to satisfy event stakeholders’ and participants’ wants and needs!

Conclusion

I believe that hybrid meetings, catapulted into industry awareness by the COVID-19 pandemic, will be a permanent fixture of the meeting industry “new normal”. Once we’ve firmly established the design and production expertise needed for hybrid, hub and spoke is a simple addition that promises the many advantages I’ve described in this post.

It may take a while, but I think we are going to see a growing use of this exciting and flexible format.

What do you think about hub and spoke meetings? Have you experienced one, and, if so, what was it like? Do you expect to use this format in future events? Share your thoughts in the comments below!