For over thirty years I’ve been making clients’ conferences significantly better, for about the cost of a conference coffee break.
How? I make conferences better by dramatically increasing attendee satisfaction. Increasing attendee satisfaction increases the effectiveness of the event for all stakeholders: attendees, sponsors, and event owners. It’s a win-win-win.
I’d argue that hiring me is the most effective and cost-effective way to improve any event.
Since 1992, I’ve designed and facilitated hundreds of conferences and thousands of meetings. From small, high-level, high-stakes get-togethers to association regional and national meetings of every size. In-person, online, and hybrid. You name it, I’ve probably done it.
I was inspired to write this post on reading Freeman‘s excellent 2024 Syndicated Survey of Event Attendees, If you haven’t already, read this survey which clearly reflects “the disconnect between what organizers provide and what attendees (and exhibitors) value most”.
Freeman’s report echoes the priorities I’ve been designing for events for decades. For example:
“Attendees want to connect with peers over shared challenges and specific topics.”
“Different attendees desire different things, but they all expect their unique needs to be met.”
“Substance, not celebrity…celebrity speakers will not boost registrations. Unless they’re experts in a relevant vertical, celebrities don’t drive behavior or outweigh what really matters.”
“Attendees have a clear desire for immersive experiences, customization, and event-enhancing technology. “
“Attendees get the most value from in-person learning opportunities when they incorporate demonstrations and hands-on activities.”
“Attendees’ most important learning element: Hands-on interaction or participatory activations.”
So, if you’re one of the thousands of people who have purchased my books or the hundreds of clients who have benefited from my meeting design and facilitation services, please don’t keep me a secret!
Get in touch, and I’ll make your conference better!
A hat tip to my friend and colleague Kristin Arnold for suggesting the title and sentiment of this post!
Many meetings still focus on creating audiences rather than community. Yes, there’s a big difference. And not just at meetings. Here’s how Damon Kiesow, Knight Chair for Digital Editing and Producing at the Missouri School of Journalism, compares the concepts of community versus audience from a journalistic perspective.
Kiesow says:
Community does not scale. Audience scales.
Community is decentralized for quality. Audience is centralized for profit.
Community is generative. Audience is extractive. —Damon Kiesow, @[email protected], Mastodon toot on Nov 06, 2022, 10:37
Kiesow concisely sums up why the news business and the meeting industry concentrate on audience rather than community. When media and meeting owners focus on short-term interests—big circulations and audiences, leading to higher status and consequential larger profits at the expense of “consumers”—it’s understandable that building community plays second fiddle to chasing media visibility and large audiences.
“What the internet changes is our relationship with the public we serve…What is the proper relationship for journalists to the public? We tend to think it’s manufacturing a product called content you should honor and buy…That’s a legacy of mass media; treating everybody the same because we had to…So we now see the opportunity to serve people’s individual needs. So that’s what made me think that journalism, properly conceived is a service.” —Interview of Jeff Jarvis by David Weinberger
A new definition of journalism: “…convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation, reducing polarization and building trust through helping citizens find common ground in facts and understanding.” —Jeff Jarvis, Facebook’s changes
Jarvis believes that journalism should serve people’s individual needs rather than manufacture content for the masses. In addition, journalism’s service should be about convening communities into civil, informed, and productive conversation.
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. Active learning occurs almost exclusively in community. Creating community at conferences around participant-driven content, therefore, creates a far more effective learning and connection-rich environment. As Kiesow illustrates for journalism, emphasizing community over audience also pays rich dividends for meeting attendees.
This brings us to a key question that is rarely openly discussed: Whom are conferences for? For decades, I have been championing peer conferences, where participants own their conferences. When the attendees are the owners, meeting designs that build and support community are the obvious way to go.
But, all too often, attendees are not the conference owners. Such owners, whether they be individuals or for-profit or non-profit entities, rarely have the same objectives for the event as the attendees. Making money for themselves or their organizations, increasing their status by running large events, promoting the ideas of a few people, or influencing the direction of a cultural or industry issue are their primary goals. Supporting attendee learning and connection is a secondary consideration.
The largely silent battles being fought about the future of journalism and meeting design are strikingly similar. Both realms can learn from each other.
[You can also read part 1 and part 3 of this series.]
Five days later, Panos Moutafis, co-founder & CEO of Zenus, the “ethical facial analysis” company, responded. I find his response inadequate, and this post explains why. I’ve included portions of Moutafis’s response, quoted in red, together with my comments. I conclude with a summary if you want to skip the details.
Here we go.
After an introduction …“Ignorance can be bliss, but it can also be dangerous.” Moutafis begins:
“Data from our ethical facial analysis service cannot be used to identify individuals. This is not an opinion. It is an indisputable fact.”
If the “Zenus AI” system is, in fact, completely unhackable, this statement may well be true. But it’s misleading because it does not address attendee privacy concerns. Why? Because, as I explained in my original post, combining Zenus facial analysis data with other attendee identification technology allows event owners to associate Zenus data with individual attendees.
Moutafis now admits this is possible, as his response now includes statements about how the Zenus system should be used. As far as I know, Zenus has not made these statements publicly before.
“If someone wants to use other technologies to identify individuals and combine the data [emphasis added], they need to obtain explicit consent first.
This is true of hotels, convention centers, event organizers, technology companies, etc. Otherwise, they are exposing themselves to liabilities.
A legal review takes place before starting to use a new service in this manner. People who work in the corporate sector and associations are familiar with these processes. This is not the Wild Wild West.”
The crucial phrase here is “and combine the data“. Moutafis is saying that when combining attendee tracking data with data supplied by the Zenus system, attendees must provide explicit consent. That means attendees must be informed about this in advance. And they must give explicit consent for event owners to use real-time continuous data from Zenus’s system to provide additional information on each attendee.
In my original post, I noted that Moutafis tries to put all the responsibility for such consent on the event owner and/or supplier of the attendee identification technology rather than his company. We’ll see why he needs to do this shortly.
GDPR and Data Privacy Regulations
Different regions and implementations have different requirements.
The European Data Protection Board, in particular, has clearly noted that facial analysis alone does not fall under Article 9.
See section 80 in the Guidelines adopted on January 29, 2020 [link].
“However, when the purpose of the processing is for example to distinguish one category of people from another but not to uniquely identify anyone the processing does not fall under Article 9.”
See section 14 in the Guidelines adopted on April 26, 2023 [link].
“The mere detection of faces by so-called “smart” cameras does not necessarily constitute a facial recognition system either. […] they may not be considered as biometric systems processing special categories of personal data, provided that they do not aim at uniquely identifying a person […] .”
In simple words. Are you using the service alone? Great.
Are you combining it with identifying information? Obtain consent or face the consequences. The pun is totally intended.
This section restates that the Zenus technology satisfies European Data Protection Board guidelines only when used in isolation. It confirms that clients combine Zenus analytics “with identifying information” “you” must “Obtain consent or face the consequences.” Again, the “you” is any entity but Zenus.
In addition, to bolster his case, Moutafis does a selective quote of section 14 in the Guidelines adopted on April 26, 2023. Here’s the entire section 14 with the portions Moutafis omitted in bold:
“The mere detection of faces by so-called “smart” cameras does not necessarily constitute a facial recognition system either. While they also raise important questions in terms of ethics and effectiveness, digital techniques for detecting abnormal behaviours or violent events, or for recognising facial emotions or even silhouettes, they may not be considered as biometric systems processing special categories of personal data, provided that they do not aim at uniquely identifying a person and that the personal data processing involved does not include other special categories of personal data. These examples are not completely unrelated to facial recognition and are still subject to personal data protection rules. Furthermore, this type of detection system may be used in conjunction with other systems aiming at identifying a person and thereby being considered as a facial recognition technology.“
Wow! Moutafis omits the “important questions in terms of ethics and effectiveness” raised by facial analysis. And, tellingly, he cuts the last key sentence entirely:
“Furthermore, this type of detection system may be used in conjunction with other systems aiming at identifying a person and thereby being considered as a facial recognition technology.“
This, of course, is exactly what Moutafis admits happens if clients use Zenus technology with any other tech that identifies individuals.
So the European Data Protection Board guidelines say that Zenus’s system effectively becomes a facial recognition system under these circumstances.
That’s not what Moutafis implies. I’d describe this section of Moutafis’s response as deliberately misleading.
Our AI badge scanning reads attendee IDs
I have little to say about this. Badge scanning tech is common at meetings. If attendees give informed consent and can opt out of badge scanning, I don’t have a problem with it. But perhaps this is a place to point out the significant difference between technology (badge scanning) that identifies attendees only at discrete attendee-determined points in time, and technology (Zenus plus attendee identification data from a separate system) that continually accumulates attendee data all the time attendees are in sensor range.
Legal vs Moral Considerations. Consent vs Notice
“People often conflate face recognition (identification) with facial analysis (anonymized data). In a similar way, they conflate legal and moral considerations.”
That’s quite a comparison! It’s saying being confused about the definitions of two types of technology is similar to being confused about legal and moral concerns of the use of such technologies.
“It might not be legally required to provide notice about the use of facial analysis in many settings. But we still think it is morally a good idea to do so in the spirit of transparency and education.
Therefore, we ask our clients to post signage on-site, talk about the use of our service in their marketing communications, and include it on their online terms and conditions.
According to the people I’ve spoken to who attended the association meetings described in my original post where Zenus technology was used, there was no “signage on-site, talk about the use of our service in their marketing communications” or notification in the meetings’ “online terms and conditions“. Perhaps the folks I talked to overlooked this “advance notice”, or these meetings were the exceptions rather than the rule. But from this limited data, it doesn’t seem that Zenus’s clients pay attention to what Zenus says it asks them to do.
What about consent versus notice? Advance notice we love. Consent defeats the purpose of anonymity.
How could one exclude a person from the anonymous analysis (if they opt-out) without identifying them? They cannot.”
Finally, we get to why Zenus continues to insist that their technology does not require consent while trying not to mention that when it is used in conjunction with attendee identification technology it does require consent. There is no way for Zenus data to remain anonymous if attendees are given the right to not consent, i.e. to opt out of being included in Zenus’s aggregated analytics! That would require the identities of attendees who have opted out to be injected into Zenus’s internal systems, which would then need to perfectly exclude them from the data fed to clients. This obviously can’t be done in a way that satisfies privacy laws. Consequently, Zenus’s whole “no consent needed” house of cards collapses!
Aggregate vs Individual Analysis
“The chances that one would analyze a person’s face or body language and infer their psychological state are slim.”
This is a strange statement. Human beings have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive to other humans’ psychological states. Most of us do such analysis unconsciously every day, whenever we are together with other people. We look at someone’s face or body language and think “They look upset/happy/worried/tired”. We might well say to them: “Are you OK?“, “Wow, you look happy!”, “You look worried about something”, “Want to take a rest?”, etc. I’d say that inferring the emotional state of someone we’re with is default behavior, rather than a slim probability.
Of course, this statement allows Moutafis to pivot to his marketing pitch:
“…analyzing a room of people multiple times per second and combining this with survey and attendance data can be insightful.”
Because that’s what Zenus has designed its technology to do.
Concluding Remarks
“Our ethical facial analysis brings organizations valuable and actionable data without crossing the line into collecting personally identifiable information.”
One more time. When you don’t include any meaningful safeguards to prevent combining your data with that of other systems that clients are free to employ, clients can easily use Zenus technology to “[cross] the line into collecting personally identifiable information“.
“It is a rare example of technology using restraint. It is an example of building proactive privacy safeguards by default. It is an example to follow.”
Sadly, it’s not. While I admire the efforts that Zenus has made to create an “ethical facial analysis service”, as I’ve now outlined in these two posts, the company has not succeeded.
Conclusions
Zenus claims that its system when used in isolation at an event doesn’t supply data about individual attendees. Maybe so. But when used in conjunction with additional tech (XYZ) that identifies individual attendees, event owners can use Zenus data to create a continually updated real-time dataset of analytics of identified individual attendees. Zenus deflects any legal or ethical company responsibility for this surveillance by saying it’s the event owner’s and/or XYZ’s to inform attendees and obtain their explicit consent to be tracked and their facial analysis used.
Crucially, Moutafis says two contradictory things.
The use of Zenus technology doesn’t need explicit consent.
The combination of Zenus technology with other attendee identification technology does require explicit consent. But that’s the legal and ethical responsibility of the event owner or the tracking technology company. Not Zenus.
Because Zenus does not require their clients to forswear using additional attendee identification technology, this, therefore, creates a fatal contradiction for the company. Why? Because, as Motafis admits, when attendees are allowed to opt out from its use—which is their right under privacy laws—there is no way for the Zenus technology to work without excluding the attendees who have opted out. To do this, the Zenus system must be able to identify individual attendees! Consequently, Zenus’s whole we-don’t-identify-individuals and no-consent-is-needed house of cards collapses!
Two unanswered criticisms from my original post
First, Moutafis was quoted as saying publicly that “some of his clients…will monitor [using Zenus AI] in real-time, and if a speaker is killing the mood they will just get him off the stage”. I said I was pretty sure that most event professionals would agree this is a highly inappropriate way to use Zenus’s technology. Or, as the Harvard Business Review put it, “AI Isn’t Ready to Make Unsupervised Decisions“. Moutafi did not respond to this.
Second, it’s important to note that Moutafis didn’t respond to a key critique of Zenus technology that I shared in my original post.
Namely, how useful is Zenus’s technology anyway?Kamprath and I gave examples of how often the most impactful sessions at meetings—impactful in the sense of changing future behavior rather than entertaining an audience—can be somewhat uncomfortable for participants at the time. Not all sessions are a “success” when people express “positive sentiment.”
One more thing…
OK, that’s two thousand more words from me on this topic, on top of four thousand last week. Hopefully, that’s enough for now. But I’d be happy to meet in a public moderated discussion with Zenus. If anyone would like to host such a discussion, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Should the event industry embrace facial analysis — a technology that promises to offer new analytic data to event stakeholders?
In this post, I’ll explain why I’m concerned. I’ve included:
An introduction to facial recognition and facial analysis;
A timeline of recent public experiences and responses to the use of facial analysis at events;
Why I think the use of this technology is misguided, ethically and legally dubious; and
My conclusions.
An introduction to facial analysis and facial recognition
You might be wondering what facial analysis is, and how it differs from facial recognition. Here’s a short introduction to these technologies, and how the meeting industry is starting to use them.
Facial recognition and analysis technologies capture information from images and videos of human faces. They have been available since the 1960s. But in the last decade, the use of facial recognition has exploded. In 2017, Apple introduced Face ID to unlock its phones and authenticate payments. Many manufacturers have since incorporated this form of biometric authentication. Governments have adopted biometric systems to meet security concerns. Such systems are appearing in public arenas like airport gate check-ins too.
So it’s not surprising that companies have developed facial technologies to provide new forms of data to event owners.
In the event industry, companies have developed facial recognition systems to streamline event registrations. Some can also track attendee movement inside a venue. These systems work by matching a pre-event registered attendee photograph, provided by the attendee, to the attendee’s face as they arrive at the event. If a match is found, the attendee is admitted without having to show proof of registration.
In a July 2023 post, Miguel Neves, editor-in-chief of Skift Meetings, describes “The True Risks of Using Facial Recognition for Events“. He includes an incident where an event required thousands of attendees to upload scans of their passports to attend in person. This led to a €200,000 fine by Spain’s data protection agency. Incidents like this may have led Zenus to focus on facial analysis rather than facial recognition.
Facial analysis
Facial analysis claims to overcome such privacy concerns by avoiding the collection of individuals’ data. The concept is that a collection device collects and analyzes incoming video data. In theory, only aggregated group statistics are provided to clients. Thus personally identifiable information is, hopefully, not directly available from the system.
The aggregate data provided by these systems typically includes “impressions” (the number of people present over time), demographics (sex and age group), “happiness”, and dwell time (how long people stay in a given area and/or how much attention they are paying to what is going on).
Illustration from Zenus website showing “Sentiment Analysis” data
Companies developing facial analysis for the events industry include Zenus and Visage Technologies.
A timeline of public experiences and responses to the use of facial analysis at events
February – March 2023
Controversy about facial analysis at events began when Greg Kamprath, after attending PCMA‘s Convening Leaders 2023, made excellent arguments against using the technology at meetings in a February 2023 LinkedIn post “You Shouldn’t Use Facial Analysis At Your Event“. He wrote the post after attending a session titled “AI, Biometrics and Better, More Targeted Experiences”. There he “was surprised a few minutes in when they told us we were being watched at that moment by cameras which were analyzing our age, gender, and emotions”.
To summarize, 2023 started with criticism of using facial analysis at events and continued with a rebuttal, followed by continued adoption of this technology by major industry associations.
Here are my responses to Moutafis’s rebuttal, listed under the same headings he uses. Afterward, I’ll add some concerns that he doesn’t address.
Concern 1: I don’t want to be analyzed
“When the analytics obtained from a service (any service) cannot be tied to a specific individual, it does not infringe on their data privacy.” —Moutafis’s first sentence after this heading
Unfortunately, this statement is misleading and wrong.
Let’s assume that the Zenus facial analysis system is indeed perfect and unhackable in any way. Consider the system running at an event in a room with only one person in it. The system works perfectly, so the data it provides accurately characterizes that person, but does not include any information that allows their identification.
If this perfect Zenus system is the only attendee data acquisition system in use, then that person’s data privacy isn’t infringed.
But what if an additional attendee data acquisition system is being used in the room? For example, here’s a screenshot from a Zenus video “Zenus AI: Ethical facial analysis at IMEX” uploaded to YouTube on November 13, 2022, and still, as I write this, publicly available.
January 2023 screenshot from Zenus YouTube video “Zenus AI: Ethical facial analysis at IMEX” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU2MPjacpjI showing an attendee’s sentiment analysis and badge information
Zenus technology identified the attendee along with his sentiment analysis! (And, as I write this, still does—see below.)
This is certainly at odds with Zenus’s claim of “ethical facial analysis”.
Even if Zenus stops doing this, there’s nothing to prevent an event owner from using an additional system that does identify individual attendees. The information from Zenus’s system can then be added to the lone identified individual in the room. The same kind of process can also be used with groups. See, for example, the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s “Debunking the Myth of ‘Anonymous’ Data” for more information on how “anonymous data rarely stays this way”.
What Zenus does
The European Data Protection Board is the European Union body responsible for creating and administering Europe’s General Data Protection Rules (GDPR). GDPR gives individuals certain controls and rights over their personal information. Here is an extract from the GDPR guidelines on the use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement. Note that these are guidelines for the use of such technologies by governments and public entities.
“The mere detection of faces by so-called “smart” cameras does not necessarily constitute a facial recognition system either. While they also raise important questions in terms of ethics and effectiveness, digital techniques for detecting abnormal behaviours or violent events, or for recognising facial emotions or even silhouettes, they may not be considered as biometric systems processing special categories of personal data, provided that they do not aim at uniquely identifying a person and that the personal data processing involved does not include other special categories of personal data. These examples are not completely unrelated to facial recognition and are still subject to personal data protection rules. Furthermore, this type of detection system may be used in conjunction with other systems aiming at identifying a person and thereby being considered as a facial recognition technology.” [emphasis added] — European Data Protection Board Guidelines 05/2022 on the use of facial recognition technology in the area of law enforcement • Version 2.0 • Adopted on 26 April 2023
“Zenus also provides a separate, unrelated QR code service for attendee tracking at events. In this service, the customer or reseller can include a unique QR code on each event attendee’s badge. When the Zenus IoT device scans a QR code at the event, Zenus will receive a record that the QR code was scanned by a particular scanning device at a particular date and time. Zenus then makes that data available to the customer or reseller. Zenus has no ability to link the QR code with a particular individual’s real identity, as Zenus does not accept any other information about the individual. Only the customer or reseller holds data that allows them to make that linkage. Zenus uses the QR code data solely to serve that particular customer or reseller as the customer’s or reseller’s “service provider” within the meaning of the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”) and “processor” within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and similar laws.”
In other words, Zenus provides a service that allows customers to track individual attendees! Zenus says this is OK because Zenus doesn’t have access to individual attendee information. But Zenus clients do!Unless each attendee consents to being tracked, this is a violation of GDPR.
“Consent must be freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous. In order to obtain freely given consent, it must be given on a voluntary basis. The element ‘free’ implies a real choice by the data subject. Any element of inappropriate pressure or influence which could affect the outcome of that choice renders the consent invalid.” —extract from GDPR Consent definition
Moutafis ends this section by saying that “events are spaces of high visibility”, where attendees wear badges with their names, agree to be photographed, and provide information to registration systems. The implication is that, therefore, attendees have no reason to object to automated systems that vacuum up their visible behavior.
This is like saying that people in a public space who are talking to each other shouldn’t object if systems with sensitive microphones pick up all their conversations and make use of them. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
Concern 2: Advance notice about the service
I’m glad that Moutafis says “We advocate for advance notice because it is the best way to build trust in the community”. Even though the company claims that “Consent is not required”.Whether event owners actually give advance notice is, however, an important question. I’m inclined to judge people and organizations on what they do, rather than what they say. And, as Kamprath noted in his LinkedIn post, in February 2023, PCMA Convening Leaders (PCMACL) did not inform attendees in advance that facial analysis would be used and he saw no signage at at the event. In his rebuttal, Moutafis says, “CCTV systems exist in all public spaces, along with disclosures about camera surveillance [italics added].” So? Zenus and PCMA apparently did not provide advance notice!
Fortunately for both these organizations, PCMACL 2023 was held in Ohio, which does not currently have a law protecting privacy. If the event had been held in California, for example, their failure to give advance notice would be a violation of the California Consumer Privacy Act, and the California Attorney General or the California Privacy Protection Agency could take legal action against both organizations.
Providing a facial analysis system to anyone who wants to use one and merely suggesting that they let the subjects know it is operating is unethical, in my opinion. A sticker on a tiny camera is simply inadequate. Providing advance notice via visible and plentiful signage should be a requirement for obtaining and using this technology. It would be even better to prominently include advance notice in written communications to attendees when registering.
Privacy protections in other U.S. states
I don’t know the U.S. states where such a failure to adequately inform in advance would currently violate state law. But as I write this:
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, and Virginia have privacy laws currently in effect;
Florida, Montana, and Oregon will have privacy laws in effect by the end of 2024; and
Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Tennessee, and Texas will have privacy laws in effect by January 1, 2o26.
More details on state laws can be found at DataGuidance.
Concern 3: The system does not do what we are told
Moutafis seems to include two issues under this heading. The first is his claim that Zenus’s system provides accurate information about “aggregated statistics on impressions, dwell time, age, biological sex, and positive sentiment, among other metrics”. The second is that people worry that the Zenus devices might be hacked.
I can’t evaluate the accuracy of the data provided by Zenus’s system. However, research indicates that
Moutafis says that the Zenus service “complies” with GDPR rules. While fully anonymized data is not subject to GDPR rules, combining Zenus’s data with data from other systems can, as we’ve seen, lead to Zenus’s customers adding Zenus data to an individual’s data. Without advance notice and consent, this situation is a violation of GDPR and other privacy laws.
But, again, the overall security of any technology is defined by its weakest component. As described above, if an event owner adds a system that does identify and/or track individual attendees, whether Zenus’s stand-alone technology obeys “GDPR rules, [survives] third-party penetration tests, [or meets] SOC 2 standards” becomes irrelevant, as its output may now add to the data captured by the weaker system.
Concern 4: Decisions shouldn’t be made with AI
Kamprath quotes Moutafis as saying at the PCMA Convening Leaders session: “[Moutafis] said some of his clients…will monitor in real time and if a speaker is killing the mood they will just get him off the stage”. Moutafis’s rebuttal says: “In these instances, there is nothing wrong with trusting the data to make informed adjustments in real time.”
Really? How many event professionals have been using or are going to use Zenus AI in this way? Not too many…I hope.
Why? Because, as Kamprath points out:
“What if a session’s content is important, but it doesn’t cause facial expressions a computer would categorize as “positive sentiment?” Imagine a speaker who is presenting a difficult truth – someone from a disadvantaged group describing a hardship, or a worker conveying the situation on the ground to leadership. AI facial analysis would show the audience wasn’t happy and so maybe those presenters aren’t invited to speak again. (Or god forbid given the boot in real time)
Exactly. Some of the most important and impactful experiences I’ve had at meetings have been uncomfortable. Moutafi doesn’t seem to realize that not all events are a “success” only when people express “positive sentiment”.
Moutafis tries to dilute his message by adding that “users consider multiple sources of information, including surveys.” But again, how he marketed his technology at PCMACL 2023 tells us more about how he implements Zenus facial analysis than what he says in print.
Concern 5: Cameras may get hacked
I’ve already commented on camera hacking above. Again, I’m happy to assume that the Zenus AI units are “secure enough“. But I will add that Moutafis’s response to reasonable concerns about hacking is, well, hyperbolic.
“With this fearful logic, organizers should start collecting attendees’ phones at the entrance and remove the CCTV equipment from venues. They should also terminate AV companies that stream content, including pointing cameras at the audience and drop all registration companies. After all, hacking a registration company is more damaging than gaining access to aggregated and anonymized data.” —Moutafis
Concern 6: The scope of surveillance will increase
Moutafis says:
“…it is safe to use products with built-in privacy safeguards.
One of the worries expressed was about other computer vision solutions, such as our new badge scanning solution. It detects QR codes up to 6–7 feet from the camera. The service requires explicit consent before data is tied to a specific individual. There are also easy opt-in/out mechanisms to offer peace of mind. It is no different than RFID and BLE used in events for decades. It is no different than manual badge scanning for lead retrieval, access control, and assigning CEU credits.”
The problem with this is that Zenus’s privacy policy makes no mention of requiring “explicit consent before data is tied to a specific individual“! Zenus’s privacy policy only refers to “personnel of our past, present and prospective customers, business partners, and suppliers.”
This is important. Event attendees are not Zenus’s customers!
Zenus is avoiding any legal or contractual responsibility to attendees about how its systems impact their privacy. The organizations that buy Zenus’s systems are, apparently, free to do whatever they like with Zenus’s devices. That includes combining their devices’ output with Zenus’s badge-scanning solution or any other attendee-tracking system. When they do this, the scope of surveillance will indeed increase.
Concern 7: Informed consent
Moutafis says:
“Some people call for mandatory consent requirements for all services — even the ones that do not collect personally identifiable information. But that will result in an effective ban on numerous technological advancements. And the rhetorical question is — to what end? If one insists on that (opinions are a right for all), they should also suggest an alternative solution to offset the cost with an equal or greater benefit. Until then, there is consensus among institutions and practitioners that this is unnecessary because there is no risk to data privacy.”
This is an example of the straw man fallacy. What the vast majority of attendees want is reassurance that their privacy rights will be respected, they are informed about the impact of new technology on their activities, and they have the right to provide or reject consent to that technology being used when it does not respect their privacy rights. Moutafis distorts this into an all-or-nothing demand for “mandatory consent requirements for all services — even the ones that do not collect personally identifiable information”. However, given the failings I’ve listed above, attendees do not currently have the assurance that Zenus’s systems respect their privacy rights in the real world. That’s why his statement is a strawman.
To help protect personal information, we have put in place physical, technical, and administrative safeguards. However, we cannot assure you that data that we collect under this Privacy Policy will never be used or disclosed in a manner that is inconsistent with this Privacy Privacy.”
In other words, “even though we insist our technology doesn’t collect personally identifiable information we can’t guarantee it won’t.”
Good to know.
Conclusions
Whew, this turned into a much longer post than I expected! During my research on the appropriate use of facial analysis, I found three perspectives on the ill-defined legal status of facial analysis that don’t quite fit into my response to Moutafis’s post. I’ve included them here, followed by a summary of my conclusions.
Three perspectives on the legal status of facial analysis
Unfortunately, the legal status of facial analysis remains unclear. The Global Privacy Assembly, “the premier global forum for data protection and privacy authorities for more than four decades”, points this out in an October 2022 report.
Access Now is an international organization that “defends and extends the digital rights of people and communities at risk”. In this submission to the European Data Protection Board, the EU body responsible for creating and administering the GDPR, they say:
“…paragraph 14 [of the European Data Protection Boardʼs guidelines 05/2022] states that facial detection and facial analysis, including emotion recognition, are not types of facial recognition. This goes against the common use of the term facial recognition as an umbrella term for a range of processes, including detection, verification, identification and analysis/categorisation/classification. Arbitrarily excluding detection and analysis from the term facial recognition will only give credence to the problematic line often taken by industry that when they are performing facial analysis, for example, they are ‘not doing facial recognition.’ [emphasis added]” —Access Now submission to the consultation on the European Data Protection Boardʼs guidelines 05/2022 on the use of facial recognition technology in the area of law enforcement, 27 June 2022
Finally, Nadezhda Purtova, Professor of Law, Innovation and Technology at Utrecht University is skeptical that facial analysis will “withstand legal scrutiny”.
“A relatively recent case of such technological development is face detection and analysis used in ‘smart’ advertising boards. Unlike with facial recognition where one’s facial features are compared to pre-existing facial templates to establish if a person is known, face detection and analysis do not recognize people but ‘detect’ them and, in case of smart billboards, classify them into gender-, age-, emotion-, and other groups based on processing of their facial features to display tailored ads. The industry that develops, sells, and employs the technology argues that facial detection does not involve processing personal data, eg because the chance of establishing who a person before the ‘sensor’ is close to null. In part this is due to the ‘transient’ nature of the processing, where raw data of an individual processed by the detection ‘sensors’ is discarded immediately. The technology does not allow tracking a person and recognizing him or her over time either. To be clear, as will become apparent from further analysis, these industry arguments do not necessarily withstand legal scrutiny and it is highly likely that personal data will be processed in these contexts, if the proposed interpretation of identification is adopted. Yet, there is no uniform position on the interaction of face detection and data protection across the EU Member States. For instance, the Dutch data protection authority considers face detection in the context of smart billboards as processing of personal data, while its Irish and reportedly Bavarian counterparts are of the opposite view.” [emphasis added] —Nadezhda Purtova, International Data Privacy Law, 2022, Vol 12, No. 3, From knowing by name to targeting: the meaning of identification under the GDPR
Final comments
12 years ago, I wrote, “Who gets your information when you register at an event?” The following year, I wrote, “Whom is your event for; the organizers or the attendees?” It’s revealing that those who are in favor of facial analysis technology are the technology suppliers and show owners. Those who are critical of it are attendees.
There is no win-win here. What’s good for show owners and the suppliers whose services they buy is bad for attendee privacy and openness. Show owners are using facial analysis with zero notification. And if attendees are told in advance that their faces will be analyzed, they may be deterred from attending such events or expressing their opinions freely. Or they may have no choice but to attend for business reasons without the option of consenting or opting out.
I don’t see how facial analysis technology can address these concerns. We should worry when Moutafis says that Zenus addresses them when in reality they don’t. That’s why I agree with Kamprath when he says You Shouldn’t Use Facial Analysis At Your Event.
The meeting industry has an ethical responsibility to do the right thing.
Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
P.S. And wait, there’s more! This epic isn’t over! Panos Moutafis, the CEO of Zenus, responded to this post, and I’ve shared my response to his in this post.
Here’s an independent review of my conference design work, published as a case study in Chapter 25—Designing and Developing Content for Collaborative Business Events—of the book The Routledge Handbook of Business Events. (Tip: The hardback version is expensive, the ebook is a quarter of the hardback cost.) The chapter was written by Ruth Dowson, Chantal Dickson, and Simon Bell.
Case Study: Adrian Segar – “Conferences that work”
For over 35 years, Adrian Segar has facilitated, presented at, and experienced hundreds of conferences and other business events. Originally from a scientific academic background, as an independent consultant in the United States, Segar attended traditional academic conferences and meetings, becoming fascinated by the outcomes (and lack of outcomes) when people were assembled together with the intention of teaching, connecting with, and learning from each other. As he worked with and for his clients within their organisational environments, to identify and deliver specified outcomes, Segar realised that the structures and events created by these organisations were not only failing to fulfill their intended results, but that there were additional issues, arising from dysfunctional relationships within their organisations, that were not being addressed by formal business event structures. People problems were at the root of the matter. By learning from the dilemmas that organisations faced, since 1992 Segar has advanced an approach to developing and delivering conferences and meetings that would address these important concerns, and this approach has become his theme: ‘Conferences that work’. Segar advocates an approach to support conference designers in making the greatest improvements to the outcomes of their business events. Segar suggests that such improvements are not achieved by providing exciting, trendy or healthy food and refreshments, or incorporating the latest audio-visual and technology components, or designing costly décor that can enhance a creative environment. Instead, he challenges the time-honoured processes by which conferences and other business events have been designed for hundreds of years.
Rather than have business event attendees listening passively to lectures, Segar’s processes aim to transform them into active participants, in events structured with opportunities to enable them to make significant connections, to influence and decide their own agendas and content, to contribute their own expertise, and to learn from each other. As a result, participants value the time and effort they supply to these engaging occasions, whilst the outcomes for organisers and clients are met more effectively. Segar suggests that “Participant-led and participation-rich conferences disrupt the age-old conference-design model by fulfilling 21st century audiences’ need to take control of learning environments and by capitalizing on their collective wisdom and experience.”
Segar reasons that, in theory, a conference provides useful content, an opportunity to acquire relevant knowledge, to enable learning from others, getting answers and solving problems. In between structured sessions, there are scheduled breaks to enable informal information gathering. A key component of a conference is networking, whereby attendees make informal contacts during breaks or social time, outside of the formal structure of the event. But Segar asserts that this approach to designing conferences and other business events is too haphazard: what if the content isn’t quite what is needed, or attendees don’t learn what will help them to solve the problems they face, or if they don’t manage to connect with the people who might help them? Meetings that involve connecting with peers could recognise the innate wisdom of other participants in enabling each other to develop solutions to common issues, building community and longer-lasting productive relationships in the process. When a business event is built around attendee interaction, empowering participants to shape the content through active involvement and engagement, the outcomes are more likely to be successful, and at the same time, stronger and more meaningful relationships will result.
In order to share this learning more widely, Segar has written event design books that provide formats, tools, and techniques for event producers and planners to design their own participative events. ‘Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love’ (2009) sets out a step-by-step approach to designing participant-driven events, transforming conferences and professional meetings into what participants want and need them to be. ‘The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action’ (2015) details how to design individual conference sessions. Segar’s processes improve meetings and conference sessions, “by turning passive attendees into active participants, to maximise the learning, connection, engagement, community building and consequential action that takes place at sessions and meetings”.
Segar recognises that books and websites can only initiate limited levels of understanding and change, so in addition to the complimentary resources provided on his website and blog, he offers an experiential approach to learning about the processes for developing participant-led events, providing activities that explore the techniques and theoretical aspects of his work. These ‘POPWORKS’ workshops are hosted across North America and Europe as well as online.)
Citation
Dowson, R., Dickson, C., & Bell, S. (2023) ‘Designing and developing content for collaborative business events.’ In: Arcodia, C. (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Business Events. Abingdon: Routledge. Many thanks for Ruth Dowson’s permission to reproduce this case study. Ruth was a Senior Lecturer in Events Management at Leeds Becket University for many years and is currently writing a book about cultural risk assessments for events and, intriguingly, completing a Ph.D. on the eventization of faith.
I’m indebted to Martin Sirk for sharing remarkable information about an 1828 conference designed by the German geographer, naturalist, and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Read what follows to discover that Humboldt was also a meeting designer way ahead of his time!
“Humboldt was revolutionizing the sciences. In September 1828 he invited hundreds of scientists from across Germany and Europe to attend a conference in Berlin.* Unlike previous such events at which scientists had endlessly presented papers about their own work, Humboldt put together a very different programme. Rather than being talked at, he wanted the scientists to talk with each other. There were convivial meals and social outings such as concerts and excursions to the royal menagerie on the Pfaueninsel in Potsdam. Meetings were held among botanical, zoological and fossil collections as well as at the university and the botanical garden. Humboldt encouraged scientists to gather in small groups and across disciplines. He connected the visiting scientists on a more personal level, ensuring that they forged friendships that would foster close networks. He envisioned an interdisciplinary brotherhood of scientists who would exchange and share knowledge. ‘Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible; he reminded them in his opening speech.
*Humboldt organized this conference for the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians.”
Humboldt implemented, in 1828, many features of today’s participant-driven, participation-rich conferences.
In one way this is not surprising, as I’ve mentioned in my brief history of the development of conferences in my book Conferences That Work.
“These Conferences are held once in a Month by divers Able Masters making reflexions and observations upon the rarest pieces in the Cabinet of his Most Christian Majesty…” —A Relation of the Conferences Held at Paris in the Academy Royal for the Improvement of the Arts of Painting and Sculpture, as ‘tis Found in the Journal Des Scavans, A. E. H. Love in Philosophical Transactions (1665–1678), Vol. 4, 1669
We don’t know much about the Able Masters of the Academy Royal who began holding their art conferences in 1666, but given that the mid-17th century was the dawn of formal art criticism, I don’t think the Able Masters sat in rows listening to Abler Masters. Instead, I visualize a room of fledgling critics, magnificently gowned, standing around a Leonardo da Vinci drawing while arguing about the role of perspective in painting, creating a witty salon of a conference, full of arguments and opinions shared among peers.
This vision of mine is a fantasy—yet it illustrates an important point. When a new area of human knowledge or interest blossoms, there are no experts—only a vanguard struggling to see clearly, to understand more deeply, to learn. During this period a traditional conference format can only offer an uneasy fit—if there are no experts yet, who will present? Today’s explosion of knowledge and, hence, associated conference topics, implies an increasing need for flexible conference approaches that can adapt to spontaneous, real-time discoveries of directions and themes that attendees want to explore. —From Chapter 1 of Conferences That Work
When people create a community of practice for any new profession, topic, or issue, its initial meeting form is very similar to what Humboldt did. (Or what I and others did when we wanted to meet with peers about implementing administrative computing in small schools in 1992, leading to the formation of edACCESS.)
That’s because when a community of practice forms, there are no “experts” or community members with high relative status because no one knows each other. Unfortunately, it’s common for such communities to stratify over time when they meet, as they revert to the dominant one-teacher-many-learners model we experience throughout our schooling.
Peer conferences/unconferences buck this trend. They provide meeting processes that remain open to the likelihood that every participant has something to offer other participants. They make it as easy as possible to discover peers who are useful resources for each other. Finally, they continue to respect the reality that the smartest person in the room is the room.
So we can reasonably assume that the earliest “conferences” were quite similar to the peer conferences/unconferences of today. Humboldt “envisioned an interdisciplinary brotherhood of scientists who would exchange and share knowledge”. Replace “scientists” with your community description of choice (and find a more gender-neutral word for “brotherhood” if there is one) and you have a decent description of what my work is about.
Humboldt was a privileged, high-status man living two hundred years ago. What is remarkable about his meeting design is that he didn’t simply replicate the status quo. Instead, he created a conference that maximized participant connection, used multiple interesting venues to meet, and emphasized small group conversations. Impressive!
Join me in Rome next week (November 21 – 26)! On November 24 I’m leading a Masterclass at the 2023 Best Event Awards Festival. The topic? Creating and supporting meaningful participation at events.
There’s also an opportunity to meet with me in Studio Room 2 from 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM CET to explore questions and issues arising from the session or that weren’t addressed and tackle questions on how to solve your top-of-mind concerns. You don’t need to have participated in the session. You’ll determine what we talk about!
If you’re participating in the BEA World Festival or are in Rome on November 21 – 26 and would like to hang out, please contact me and we’ll get together! If you can’t be there but know an event professional who will, please introduce us!
Meetings and conferences are perhaps one of the most important fundamental ways in which people come together and change happens. Yet this topic is rarely the focus of much academic study. So I’m pleased to discover an academic research article paper about unconference — especially since its title is: The Future Of Conferences Is Unconferences! The paper appears in the October 2023 issue of the venerable Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Interactions journal. ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society.
Now, I’m not a fan of the term “unconference” because:
The paper begins with a critique of traditional conferences that will be familiar to regular readers of this blog: one-sided communication, high costs, environmental impact, and time away from other obligations.
Consequently the authors propose a new model: locally grouped unconferences, that prioritize informal connections and participant-driven content over formal presentations, challenging the hierarchical structure of conventional conferences.
An unconference-style event for local researchers
To assess the feasibility of this model for academic research, a group of researchers in the northeastern U.S. organized an unconference-style Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) event for local researchers. This event was free to attend and focused on interactions between researchers, with an emphasis on dynamic and meaningful interactions.
This one-day event was restricted to 70 participants, and included World Café and three 45-minute panel sessions, each featuring four panelists presenting their research findings. The panel sessions received positive feedback, though some participants noted challenges in selecting panelists and finding relevant papers for discussion.
The World Café table topics and the panelists were chosen in advance, so this wasn’t really a true unconference. However, participants reported “unanimous satisfaction”, “making meaningful connections”, and “interest in attending future similar events”.
The key elements of the unconference program included socialization, dissemination, and event organization. Socialization activities, such as an icebreaker and World Cafe-style discussions, were highly appreciated by participants for promoting engagement. However, they were less effective at identifying collaboration opportunities. [The peer conferences I’ve been running since 1992 are far more effective in this regard.] Participants found the smaller size of the event and unstructured socializing to be conducive to meaningful connections.
Size and location
The authors say that the size and location of the event are crucial. A right-sized event allows for meaningful networking without overwhelming attendees. Participants expressed a willingness to travel to other locations, provided they were easily accessible. They proposed that regional meetups should occur between quarterly and biannually to provide more regular contact with researchers. They should complement official conferences rather than compete with them. The goal is to make conferences more accessible and enjoyable, especially for junior scholars and those with fewer resources.
Conclusions
In conclusion, the paper states that a decentralized regional meetup model offers a promising alternative to traditional academic conferences. Its cost-effectiveness, emphasis on interactions, and potential for more regular contact among researchers make it a valuable addition to the academic conference landscape.
The authors believe that the success of this local unconference model suggests it can mitigate the drawbacks of traditional conferences. To promote more local gatherings, organizers can leverage the lower cost and preparation time of such events. They can also create a portal for organizers to share their experiences and knowledge, enabling others to learn from their experiences.
The authors offer these key insights:
A localized unconference model for academic conferences can serve as a viable alternative to mitigate the inherent drawbacks of conventional conferences.
Key to the success of such regional meetups is lower friction of organizing.
Such regional meetups should focus more on interactions between researchers than the dissemination of knowledge.
I use the phrase “wants and needs” a lot when talking about participant-driven and participation-rich conferences. It even appears in the title of my third book! Satisfying wants and what Abraham Maslow called growth needs are core goals of any event.
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. But Julius didn’t see them catch on and now focuses on other aspects of the meeting industry.
I’ve been a facilitator, designer, and proponent of unconferences (aka peer conferences) since 1992. I still believe that these events, when well-designed and facilitated, offer the best attendee experience for the majority of conferences that are held today.
So, why aren’t unconferences more popular? Here are my six reasons.
1—Unconferences that aren’t
According to Wikipedia, unconferences are participant-driven meetings where the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting.
Unfortunately, far too many event promoters either haven’t a clue about what an unconference is, or, worse, deliberately call their events unconferences when they aren’t. They use “unconference” as a marketing buzzword to make their event sound cooler.
Let’s be clear. An event that:
Asks potential presenters to submit pre-event proposals for sessions isn’t an unconference.
Includes breakout sessions as well as presentations isn’t an unconference. [No, really, some folks say this!]
Claims unconference means that you get to choose which sessions you want to attend isn’t an unconference. [Don’t believe me? That’s how Google defines its annual Search Central unconference! <sigh>]
When attendees have a poor experience at what I call “ununconferences” that they’ve been told and believe are unconferences, naturally they will conclude that unconferences are nothing special.
2—Poor unconference design
Half a century ago, as a lowly graduate student, I attended tons of traditional academic conferences. And I hated them.
Many people have the same experience. So it’s understandable that when they have the desire or opportunity to create a conference themselves, they decide that they will open up the choice of program sessions to the attendees. They will hold an unconference!
The problem is that they often have no experience of what’s needed to create a good unconference. The tendency is to assume that because you’re rejecting the rigid format of traditional conferences, you can get away with less structure.
In reality, unconferences require a fair amount of structure. And it needs to be the right structure. For example, figuring out what attendees actually want and need to talk about doesn’t happen at the drop of a hat. Introducing attendees to each other and then facilitating connection around relevant content is an art, not a science. Closing sessions that meet personal and group wants and needs are often absent.
Because many so-called unconferences suffer from non-existent or poor design and/or facilitation they often turn out to be chaotic and unsatisfying. Such attendee experiences further reinforce the myth that unconferences are no big deal.
3—Overlooking the space needs of unconferences
Novices who try to hold unconferences invariably underestimate venue space needs. Compared to traditional conferences with the same number of participants, unconferences need larger general session rooms, because participants need to move about and meet in small groups, rather than sitting in fixed dense sets of tables and chairs. They also need more separate breakout spaces for participants to meet. Venue room capacity charts don’t include these designs. The result is that novice-organized unconferences rarely have the venue space they need to work well.
The solution to this is to design your unconference before choosing the venue. When this doesn’t happen (sadly, most of the time in my experience) the conference design, no matter how good it is, suffers.
4—Non-existent or insufficient pre-unconference attendee preparation
Unconferences are fundamentally different from broadcast-style meetings. Unconferences are led by participants, while traditional meetings are led by presenters. For an unconference to be successful, attendees need pre-event preparation. This is not a big deal, but it needs to be done. Conveners of well-designed unconferences explain, in general terms via pre-event communications what the unconference will be like and how to prepare for it.
One way to introduce conference newbies to a recurring unconference is to use a buddy system. Pairing returning participants with newbies and having the pairs get in touch with each other before the event is an excellent way to prepare folks who haven’t experienced an unconference before.
5—Assuming that “unconference” is synonymous with “Open Space”
Open Space is the most well-known unconference format. For many who plan an unconference, it’s the only format they’re aware of.
Don’t get me wrong. Open Space is an excellent format for short unconferences, and I’ve used it frequently myself. But it is not the only format available and is often not the best choice. I’ve written about this in my books; here’s a short critique of Open Space. In a sentence, Open Space provides little opportunity for participants to discover important peers, privileges extroverts, may not meet the actual wants and needs of participants, and uses a rather crude closing process.
A well-facilitated Open Space unconference is often an improvement over holding a traditional meeting with the same participants. But it is far from the only format that organizers can and should use.
6—The “unconference track” trap
Some event stakeholders make the well-intentioned but disastrous mistake of adding an unconference track to their traditional conference.
Most attendees don’t know what an unconference is or have had a bad experience at a poorly designed event. The result is that very few people will attend an unconference track. The event organizers notice the poor attendance, decide that providing an unconference “option” is not needed, and go back to a fully traditional conference format at subsequent events.
Well-designed unconferences are alive and well
People are holding well-designed unconferences all the time. Very few are large or high-profile. The variety of organizations and communities that run them might surprise you. (For example, while writing this I heard about the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association unconference, about which they made an excellent video.)
IBTTA July 2023, Nashville unconference (click to watch)
To get a taste of what’s going on, I maintain a peer conference calendar that lists unconferences that I hear of or are told about. Check out my calendars of past and upcoming unconferences. And if you’re holding one, submit the details and I’ll happily add it to my calendar!
Don’t keep me a secret!
My January 15, 2024 article “
Whether event owners actually give advance notice is, however, an important question. I’m inclined to judge people and organizations on what they do, rather than what they say. And, as Kamprath noted in his LinkedIn post, in February 2023, PCMA Convening Leaders (PCMACL) did not inform attendees in advance that facial analysis would be used and he saw no signage at at the event. In his rebuttal, Moutafis says, “CCTV systems exist in all public spaces, along with disclosures about camera surveillance [italics added].” So? Zenus and PCMA apparently did not provide advance notice!
Meetings and conferences are perhaps one of the most important fundamental ways in which people come together and change happens. Yet this topic is rarely the focus of much academic study. So I’m pleased to discover an academic research article paper about unconference — especially since its title is: 
I use the phrase “wants and needs” a lot when talking about participant-driven and participation-rich conferences. It even appears in the title of 
![Are unconferences popular? An extract from Adrian Segar’s peer conference calendar, available at https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/upcoming-events/ [future events] and https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/news-events/past-events/ [past events] 29 June 2023 - : UKEduCamp, 38 Mappin Street, Sheffield City Centre S1 4DT, United Kingdom More information » 22 June 2023 - : DVB World Unconference on the Future of Media Delivery, Maison de la Poste, Rue Picard 5/7 Bruxelles, 1000 Belgium More information » 01 June 2023 - 04 June 2023: SoCrates UK 2023, Alexandra House, Whittingham Dr, Wroughton, Swindon SN4 0QJ, UK More information » 20 May 2023 - 21 May 2023: SpaceUp—The Space Unconference, Angers, Loire Valley, France More information » 09 May 2023 - 10 May 2023: EBRAINS Unconference: Neuroinformatics on Psychiatric Disorders, Copenhagen, Denmark More information » 28 April 2023 - : Cardiff Translation Unconference, Insole Court, Cardiff, Wales](https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Peer_conference_calendar_sample.jpg)
Why aren’t unconferences more popular?
