"I realized this morning that your event content is the only event-related 'stuff' I still read. I think that's because it's not about events, but about the coming together of people to exchange ideas and learn from one another and that's valuable information for anyone." — Traci Browne
We are informed about conferences by email, we arrive by airplane, and we gaze at fancy PowerPoint presentations, but, year after year, over a hundred million people experience a conference process that has changed very little since the 17th century. —Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love
We need to make our conferences flexible. We need an exercise program for our events. Why? Here are three reasons.
1) Broadcast-style presentations are moving online
We spend over one hundred billion dollars every year on conferences. This figure does not include the value of attendees’ time. We routinely spend these huge amounts of money and time to bring people together to meet face-to-face. Only to feed them a program that was determined six months before. What is the point?
These days, real-time content can be shared online as soon as it’s available. It’s no longer necessary to waste time and money flying people to a common physical location where they then sit and listen to predetermined presenters. Online videos and webinars can handle known and/or mandatory content distribution efficiently and at much lower cost.
The current explosion of knowledge and, hence, associated conference topics, is driving a need for flexible conference approaches that can handle the increasingly complex and faster-paced real-time needs of today’s attendees. This is just-in-time learning. Surprisingly, there are effective and tested ways of putting attendees in charge of what they wish to learn and discuss. But you cannot give conference participants opportunities to determine what they wish to learn and discuss if you freeze your program before they arrive.
Conferences—where attendee peers come together at one time and place—are the perfect place to create a rich environment for informal peer learning. We can’t continue to waste this opportunity with the rigid pre-determined sessions of the past. Instead, we need to set up opportunities for relevant peer learning to flourish in the sessions themselves.
Exercise flexibility for a healthy event
All conference organizers know the truism that to keep people coming to your events you need to provide an experience that meets their needs. Unfortunately, many believe that this is just a question of providing the “right content”. Not anymore! Truly successful events these days need to provide the right environment and formats for desired and appropriate learning and connecting to flourish.
You can respond to this challenge by adopting participant-driven and participation-rich meeting formats and techniques that adapt to the unpredictable, individual, and constantly changing requirements of today’s attendees. This exercise, while perhaps a little painful to start, will keep you and your events flexible. Remember, the quicker you start, the healthier your events will become!
I learned to code at school when I was 15. No big deal? It was 1966. Learning to program a computer changed my life. Far more important than nearly everything else—facts I have long since forgotten—that I was “taught”.
Learning to code didn’t change my life because I could then make big bucks writing software, though my fourth career, as an IT consultant, was very kind to me. And the important truth of the video’s opening quote by Steve Jobs, “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer…because it teaches you how to think,” isn’t the main reason my life was changed.
No. The most important lesson from learning to code was that I could be creative. I discovered I had the potential to do things that no one else had done before. Programming showed me that I could make my own stuff, the way I wanted to make it.
I learned this despite the fact that this was at a time when my program was punched onto teletype paper tape, brought on public transport to a London university computer five miles away, and run through an Elliott 803, one of the world’s first semiconductor-based computers. I got to run one program a week. If it had errors, I had to wait another week before fixing it and trying again.
No one knew how to “teach programming” to fifteen-year-old kids then. Our teachers just handed us an Algol manual and asked us to figure out what we could do with it. (The IF statement was a revelation.)
I still remember my first two programs. The first found all the prime numbers less than a thousand. A nerdy task that took several weeks to get right.
My second?
I wrote, with a friend, a program that could play chess.
I never finished that second program, of course.
Only being able to run it once a week, we didn’t get much further than code that knew the rules of chess and was able to make legal moves. But what a leap for a fifteen-year-old British schoolboy—to have the freedom to choose an ambitious project that has occupied human minds for over half a century, culminating in the computer Deep Blue’s defeat of World Chess Champion Kasparov in 1997.
Today, it’s simple for children to work with inexpensive computers that can do far more, far easier, than the computers of my youth. The ability to create movies, graphics, sound, writing, and games is now at our fingertips. We know how to introduce children to the potential of these incredible machines far better than my teachers did.
The immediate feedback, wonder, opportunity for self-expression, power to create—and, yes, learning how to think—are all available in the potential of this amazing device. What most schools don’t teach? Make algebra, geometry, and calculus optional; teach programming to all children instead!
How can we create a safe environment for learning at events? In the events world, the word “safety” has a couple of meanings. The first is objective: the degree of protection from undesirable environmental hazards. At events, we maximize the objective safety of attendees by eliminating or minimizing the likelihood of tripping, slipping, falling, falling objects, food poisoning, etc.
The kind of safety I cover here is subjective safety. How safe do attendees feel? As the following quote indicates, if we are to optimize learning at a meeting we want relaxed but alert participants; in a state I like to call nervous excitement.
“…brain research also suggests that the brain learns best when confronted with a balance between stress and comfort: high challenge and low threat. The brain needs some challenge, or environmental press that generates stress as described above to activate emotions and learning. Why? Stress motivates a survival imperative in the brain. Too much and anxiety shuts down opportunities for learning. Too little and the brain becomes too relaxed and comfortable to become actively engaged. The phrase used to describe the brain state for optimal learning is that of relaxed-alertness. Practically speaking, this means as designers and educators need to create places that are not only safe to learn, but also spark some emotional interest through celebrations and rituals.”
—Jeffery A. Lackney, report excerpt from the brain-based workshop track of the CEFPI Midwest Regional Conference
It’s easy to create a meeting environment that feels unsafe for most if not all attendees. Without careful preparation, asking people to walk barefoot over hot coals, dress up in costumes, dance on stage, or give impromptu talks to a large audience will evoke feelings of discomfort and fear in almost everyone.
It’s also easy to create a safe event environment by treating people as a passive audience who are not required to participate in the proceedings in any way. Unfortunately, this is often the choice made by many meeting organizers who are themselves afraid of what might happen if attendees are subjected to something “new”.
So, how do we strike a balance between unduly scaring attendees and treating them as inactive spectators?
It’s not easy.
Creating the right amount of nervous excitement for a group of people is challenging. Each of us responds uniquely to different situations. For example, meeting someone new at a social might be easy for John and scary for Jane. But Jane has no problem skydiving from an airplane at 12,000 feet which is a prospect that terrifies John.
Ultimately, we can’t control other people’s feelings (let alone, often, our own)! Consequently, we are unable to guarantee that anyone will feel safe during a meeting session. But there are some things we can do to improve participants’ experience of safety when they face the new challenges invariably associated with learning and connecting.
Create an environment where it’s easier to make mistakes
“Learning is fun when errors don’t feel like failures.”
—Laura Grace Weldon, Fun Theory
Why is feeling OK about making mistakes important? With traditional broadcast learning, your comprehension—or lack of it—of presented material is something that happens in your brain and is essentially invisible to everyone but yourself. In a social context, this creates a great deal of safety; no one can easily see that you don’t understand.
But because experiential learning requires us to do something external, like talking to our peers about our understanding or ideas, or physically performing an activity, we lose this invisibility safety net. This brings up the possibility that others may experience us doing something “dumb”, “stupid”, “slow”, etc. (For example, read the “Graduate student story” on pages 62-64 of my book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love.)
I was educated in a school where knowing the “right answer” was praised and lack of knowledge or understanding denigrated. Consequently, I felt ashamed about “making mistakes” in public for many years. Unfortunately, this is a common experience that many learn to some degree while going to school.
So how can we create an event environment where it’s easier to make mistakes?
Here are three suggestions:
1) Tell participants that it’s impossible to make mistakes
A simple way to create a safe environment for what participants might otherwise feel is risky is to tell them that whatever they do is the right thing.
For example, when I introduce the opening technique The Three Questions at an event, I tell participants that it’s impossible to answer The Three Questions incorrectly. Whatever answers they give are the correct answers. This sounds almost too simple—but it works surprisingly well!
2) Improv exercises
One of the first games used to introduce improvisational theatre (improv) to those with no prior experience is keep the ball in the air, usually shortened to ball. Players stand in the circle and a ~12” diameter hollow rubber ball is tossed into the air. The object of each game is for the group to keep the ball in the air with any part of their body. The game ends if anyone contacts the ball twice in a row or the ball touches the ground. Holding the ball is not allowed. Each ball touch adds one to the group’s score, which the group shouts in unison after each contact. A game rarely lasts more than a minute or two, so many rounds can be played in a short time.
Games of ball get a group working together on a goal. They provide a challenge (reach a higher score than in prior games), include physical movement, and are fun to play. Sooner or later, every game of ball comes to an end because the ball hits the floor or is touched twice in a row by the same person. But because ball is a lighthearted game the thought that the last person who contacted the ball failed in some way never really matters. Everyone just wants to play another game of ball.
There are many improv variants of ball, played with one or more imaginary balls. When you are tossing and receiving multiple imaginary colored balls to people in your circle, everyone will “make mistakes”. (i\If they don’t, the leader just increases the number of balls.) Again it doesn’t matter. Everyone making mistakes is simply part of the game.
Improv exercises provide wonderful opportunities for people to get used to making mistakes. That’s why people increasingly use them for leadership development and organizational team building. Games like ball provide an enjoyable transition to environments where making mistakes is the norm, rather than something to be ashamed of.
3) Model being comfortable with messing up
It’s crucial that facilitators and leaders of conference sessions model the behaviors they wish participants to adopt. If I am not comfortable with facilitating new or impromptu approaches that may or may not work, how can I expect my participants to be comfortable attempting them? This doesn’t mean, of course, that I should deliberately mess up. But responding in a relaxed manner when I do provides a reassuring model for participants to adopt and follow.
The right to not participate
It’s important to explicitly give attendees the right not to participate. Clearly state that people do not have to take part in any given activity before it begins. When working with a group, do not put specific individuals on the spot to participate. Instead, ask the group as a whole for feedback/ideas/answers/volunteers instead.
At the start of an extended (adult) event, I tell participants that I want to treat them like adults. I encourage them to make decisions about how and when they will participate. I also explain that they can take time out from scheduled activities or devise their own alternatives when desired and appropriate.
However, it’s also fine to set limits on non-participants. An example: ask people who do not want to participate to leave the session during the activity rather than staying to watch.
Provide clear instructions
I think that one of the hardest things to do well when leading a participatory activity is providing clear instructions. After many years it’s still not unusual for someone to complain that they don’t understand the directions I’ve given. I recommend writing out a narrative for exercises beforehand and practicing until it feels natural and unforced. But this won’t cover ad hoc situations when unexpected circumstances arise and you need to improvise.
Besides sharing instructions verbally, also consider displaying them on a screen or wall posters. Or providing a printed copy for each participant. Once you’ve shared your instructions, ask if there are any questions. Then be sure to pause long enough for people to formulate and request clarification of what they don’t understand.
Learn from participant feedback. Remember what was not clear and revise your instructions as soon afterward as possible, so that the next time you run the exercise you will, hopefully, be better understood. It may take several attempts before you find the right choice of words, so don’t give up!
Consider providing explicit ground rules
Providing explicit ground rules at the start of sessions and events can, in my experience, significantly improve participants’ sense of safety while working together.
Conclusion
“There are people who prefer to say ‘Yes’, and there are people who prefer to say ‘No’. Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
—Keith Johnstone, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
As Keith Johnstone reminds us, people choose to participate or not for their own good reasons. Respect their choice by creating a safe environment for learning to make it as easy and safe as possible for them to take the risk of trying something new.
It’s a common belief that classroom training and meeting presentations are the most important ways for adults to learn what they need to know to do their jobs.
This is an understandable belief. Why? Because it was largely true for hundreds of years until around the end of the twentieth century. Until about twenty years ago, adults learned most of what they needed to know to do their jobs in the classroom.
But the whole nature of “work” has changed dramatically since the last century. Today, it turns out, adults learn the majority of what they need to know in order to do their jobs informally: through on-the-job experience and practice, connections with our peers, and self-directed learning.
How adults learn: on-the-job experience and practice
Research that began in the 1980s at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) found that about 70% of managerial learning came from the job itself. Additional research, published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1998, suggested that people learn about 70% of their jobs informally and the 70% figure appeared again in a two-year study of workers at large companies published by the Education Development Center.
Peer and self-directed learning
Well, perhaps classroom learning makes up the majority of the rest of the ways we need to learn? Nope. The CCL study referenced above also concluded that about 20% of individual professional development comes from peer learning: informal coaching, personal networks, and other collaborative and cooperative actions. The EDC study concludes that approximately 20% of what we need to know is provided by self-directed learning. This is learning we control ourselves, such as:
asking colleagues for help;
reading a relevant book or article; searching for answers on the internet; and
watching online instructional or lecture videos.
Learning from your peers is also called social learning. Increasingly, these days, we don’t have the luxury of being able to wait for scheduled training opportunities in order to respond to new job challenges. Instead, when we need to learn something professionally we tend to consult our peers and professional networks first. This is an example of just-in-time learning: we learn what we need to learn when we need it.
The 70:20:10 model
Put together, this research indicates that informal learning—experiential, social, and self-directed—makes up about 90% of the learning modalities that professionals use today. Only 10% of adult learning uses formal classroom or meeting presentation learning formats. This ratio of experiential:peer/self-directed:formal learning is known as the 70:20:10 rule. Here’s a quick overview by Charles Jennings:
What are the implications for event design?
90% of the learning modalities adult workers need and use these days are informal. So, why do we persist in making the bulk of “education” at most meetings formal presentations by experts?
Instead, we need to mirror the learning approaches that professionals need and use in their work environments. Our conferences provide a unique opportunity to tap the peer expertise and experience of assembled participants. Rather than listen to experts using broadcast models that today can be largely replaced by books, recordings, articles, and online resources, we should be using session formats that supply and support the experiential and peer-to-peer learning that attendees actually need and use.
“You send your child to the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Culture,” The Conduct of Life (1860).
Ralph Waldo Emerson knew 150 years ago that adults learn mostly from their peers and by themselves. It’s time that our meeting designs reflected this reality.
Photo attributions: Flickr users petrol alt gone and herrberta
Three years have flown by since, excited by my immediate purchase of the original iPad, I shared 13 great iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch apps for event planners. I am still a big fan of five of these apps (Simplenote, DropBox, Square, Evernote, and GoodReader) while the remainder have been discontinued (WifiTrak and, sadly, TweetDeck), or superseded in my affections (Adobe Ideas, Beat the Traffic, Box.net, Instapaper, iTalk, and WeatherBug) by other apps. Here are 7 more great iPhone/iPad apps for event planners
My original iPad is now in my wife’s hands, and my Tumi Alpha man purse (je t’adore, read the reviews!) contains these days an AT&T iPad 3 (fits in the Tumi perfectly), a Verizon iPhone 5s, and a second-generation iPod touch holding music and podcasts which, with the addition of an $8 FM radio transmitter, I use solely to pump audio into my car radio as I drive.
It’s time for an app update. Here are seven more apps that I actively use and enthusiastically recommend to event planners:
Birdbrain ($2.99)
If you are active on Twitter (and I’d argue that most event planners should be) Birdbrain is a fantastic way to manage your Twitter network. The app provides an excellent overview and management of your followers and those you follow. Birdbrain handles multiple accounts, makes it easy to investigate anyone on Twitter, allows you to track unfollows as they occur, list people you’re following who don’t follow you, display mentions and retweets, and provides informative statistics showing changes in your Twitter stats over time. The only feature I’d like to see added is the ability to show inactive accounts you’re following. Recommended!
Waze (free)
Waze is my favorite traffic and navigation app of the many that I’ve tried. Unlike traditional GPS units with traffic updates that I’ve often found to be woefully out of date, Waze uses information from its own users to detect traffic snarls and reroutes you on the fly when necessary to avoid that accident that happened up ahead five minutes ago or the rush hour traffic jam building up on the interstate you normally drive on to get home. Purchased recently by Google, my only concern is that the company will start using my location in nefarious ways. If I start seeing annoying ads promoting the tattoo parlor I’m passing by I’ll reconsider. Until then, this is an amazing app that has saved me hours of driving and frustration, and shown me countless new neighborhoods as I bypass traffic where other drivers sit fuming.
Flywheel (free app, $1 per trip surcharge)
Flywheel is my latest app love, recommended to me by my fashionable younger daughter when I was visiting her in San Francisco last month. Unlike Lyft, SideCar and Uber, Flywheel uses legal licensed taxi services to get you where you want to go. Currently, the app allows you to effortlessly hail cabs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Daytona Beach, Miami, Naples, Atlanta, Louisville, Lexington, Lansing, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, Dallas, San Antonio, and Seattle (and they say more cities are on the way). Once you’ve set up an account tied to a credit card (this takes just a few minutes), hailing a cab requires just two taps on your phone. You can then view a constantly updating display of the time before the cab arrives (never more than a few minutes in my experience), watch the cab approach on a map, and talk directly to the driver if necessary. You have a couple of minutes to change your mind; if you cancel after that you’re charged a $6 fee. The service costs $1 per trip, and your desired tipping percentage is built into the app. You never need to give cash or a credit card to the driver.
All this beats stepping out into the street in the rain and waving frantically at a cab that blithely drives past you!
Foursquare (free)
Foursquare started as a game (be the mayor of places, win badges, and have more points than your friends) and a way to see where your friends are and what they’re doing. I live mostly in a rural area and, while I have occasionally discovered and met up with friends I didn’t know were near me, my main use of this service is to store a searchable history of where I’ve been. When did I drop off that luggage to be repaired? What was the name of that great place I ate dinner with Susie in Atlanta? When exactly was I in Anguilla in 2009? Foursquare’s history of my check-ins is often useful in unexpected ways. And, yes, I admit it, it’s fun to triumphantly win back the mayorship of my favorite local restaurant once in a while…
GateGuru (free)
GateGuru is an airport information app that was purchased by TripAdvisor in June 2013. While it attempts to replicate some of Tripit‘s functionality, I use it to scope out the places to eat (aka amenities) at airports. The traveler’s reviews, while sometimes spotty, usually allow you to pick out the best place to satisfy your current gustatory desires, and I’ve occasionally found a real gem tucked away on Concourse C that I’d otherwise have missed.
Google Voice (free app, most but not all services are free)
Google Voice has been around for years and has a bazillion options, many of which I don’t really understand. But that’s OK, because I find it very useful for two things: a) transferring calls made to my cell to my office phone when I’m at home where my cell phone doesn’t work (ah, the joys of living in rural Vermont) and b) texting. Now let’s be clear: I hate texting and refuse to pay the inflated rates that carriers charge for it on my cell phone, but sometimes it’s the only way to communicate with some people (especially my two younger kids). Google Voice to the rescue! I can text for free from my free Google Voice number, which works with strangers as long as I let them know in the message that it’s me, Adrian Segar, texting them.
Incidentally, though I haven’t yet used this feature, calls made using Google Voice from outside the U.S. to U.S. numbers cost just 1¢/minute; a pretty good rate!
OpenTable (free)
OpenTable allows you to make free reservations at ~30,000 restaurants in the United States, Canada, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and the UK. No more phone calls to a restaurant only to get an answering machine, having to leave a message, and wondering whether you’ll get the reservation you wanted or not. The app works quickly and many reservations give you OpenTable points which can eventually be redeemed for a discount off your meal.
Well, these are some of my favorite iPhone/iPad apps for event planners that make it a little easier to travel, communicate, and eat while I’m on the road. What apps have I missed that are especially useful to event planners that you think should be added to this list? Let us know in the comments below!
“It’s been clear from the beginning of the Web that it gives us access to experts on topics we never even thought of. As the Web has become more social, and as conversations have become scaled up, these crazy-smart experts are no longer nestling at home. They’re showing up like genies summoned by the incantation of particular words. We see this at Twitter, Reddit, and other sites with large populations and open-circle conversations.This is a great thing, especially if the conversational space is engineered to give prominence to the contributions of drive-by experts. We want to take advantage of the fact that if enough people are in a conversation, one of them will be an expert.”
—David Weinberger, Globalization of local experience
This is exactly why the Conferences That Work format works so well. Peer conferences allow participants to discover the conference experts in (what was formerly known as) the “audience” they want to meet, connect with, and learn from. Instead of restricting teachers to the few folks at the front of the room, peer conferences allow us to tap the experience and expertise of anyone that’s present.
In other words, Conferences That Work extend the effectiveness of the online conversations that David describes above to face-to-face meetings.
What happens when a guy brings bagpipes to your event?
“My full-day live seminars have impact on people partly because I don’t announce the specific agenda or the talking points in advance. It’s live and it’s alive. I have no certainty what’s about to happen, and neither do the others in the room. A morphing, changing commitment by all involved, one that grows over time.”
—The Show Me State (of the art), Seth Godin
I run conferences and sessions like Seth’s. I don’t really know what’s going to happen and neither do the participants. Yes, I have an overall structure in mind, but there’s always room for an impromptu performance by the guy who just happens to have brought a set of bagpipes (that was edACCESS 2011, I think), and the unexpected sessions on sea kayaking (Fixing Food Oregon 2009) and Spiritual Leadership (last week at the VLN 1st annual conference).
It’s not only the unexpected topics and activities that it turns out people want and get but also the serendipitous connections that get made. One of the things I feel best about? The lifelong friendships between seemingly unlikely souls, sparked by events I’ve had a hand in. You can’t put a price on that.
So why do most events still insist on trumpeting precise program schedules? We do, of course, go to such sessions hoping to learn something new. And perhaps something surprising will happen. Sadly, we often don’t learn much and are rarely surprised.
Why set up the majority of events this way? I’ve written about this here and more extensively in (free download) Chapter 3 of Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, but another reason is that most of us are fearful of trying something new if we think we might fail at it. I’m no exception. I’ve lived with this fear most of my life. (Apart from my early years, when this fear is largely absent in everyone.) Only in the last dozen years or so have I begun to rediscover the joy of the adventures that begin when I say “Yes” to what life offers me.
What frustrates me is that most people who experience events designed to accommodate and support the unexpected discover they prefer them. But until they take a chance and attend one, they’ll never know what they’re missing.
Viv McWaters and Johnnie Moore call the need to know what something will be like before you commit to it “the tyranny of the explicit“. Need more information before you act? Stuck! Viv quotes Keith Johnstone: “Those who say ‘Yes’ are rewarded by the adventures they have, and those who say ‘No’ are rewarded by the safety they attain.”
When you say “No” you’re safe (unless it’s an emergency.) But you’ll miss out on the learning and delight that is the constant companion of the unexpected.
Ultimately, it’s your choice.
On balance, I’m glad that my events are pretty open to the unexpected. Otherwise, the guy who brought bagpipes to my conference would have just left them in the trunk of his car. Let the hornpipe begin!
Who gets your information when you register at an event?
One time, I was browsing the website of a conference at which I was presenting and saw a link to a list of registrants. One click later, I possessed a nice Excel spreadsheet containing the names, companies, and “badge type” for the seven hundred attendees. Hmmm. At the bottom of the spreadsheet, I noticed a second tab: “Sheet1”. Clicking on that showed a smaller list of a hotel chain’s participants that included emails. Yikes!
This got me thinking about who gets our conference information when we register. Personally, my contact information is freely available; it would be hard not to find my email, office phone, and mailing address with a quick search. But I doubt that many conference attendees share my promiscuous nature.
I suspect that many conference participants don’t want their information freely handed out to all and sundry. Practitioners of a conference topic or field usually don’t want to be bombarded with emails and calls from suppliers of products and services relevant to their profession (and even less, communications from vendors in whom they have no interest). But most of us have seen this happen more than we’d like.
Yet there is seldom a clear explanation when we register for an event as to how conference organizers, sponsors, trade show participants, app developers, etc. can use the information we give at registration. What might these parties do with it? If they are contractors, are there any restraints on sharing or selling to third parties?
As a conference facilitator, I’ve always had access to attendee registrations. But no one has ever asked me to sign an NDA for the information I’m privy to.
These days, when you can convert a registration list in a few minutes into data for a bulk email, mail, or phone campaign, let’s start thinking about these questions and coming up with some answers. Event organizers and planners: take responsibility for requested data, and clearly communicate how you will use it.
Otherwise, attendees may start registering using this. And that would be a shame.
Does it bother you that you don’t know how your registration information will be used? What are you doing at your events so that attendees know who will have access to their information?
Conferences need to be flexible!
No one knew how to “teach programming” to fifteen-year-old kids then. Our teachers just handed us an 
Three years have flown by since, excited by my immediate purchase of the original iPad, I shared 
Foursquare
GateGuru
Google Voice
OpenTable
It’s not only the unexpected topics and activities that it turns out people want and get but also the serendipitous connections that get made. One of the things I feel best about? The lifelong friendships between seemingly unlikely souls, sparked by events I’ve had a hand in. You can’t put a price on that.