Through attending decades of Vermont Town Meetings, I learned that effective facilitation requires respect. For over two hundred years, my little hometown of Marlboro, Vermont, met at least once a year for “town meeting”: a form of local government where […]
On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, I sat down with Martin Duffy and Paul Nunesdea on LinkedIn Live for an hour’s deep dive conversation about peer conferences: the participant-driven, participation-rich events I’ve designed and facilitated for over thirty years. You can […]
This is not another success story about becoming a writer. Outwardly, I’ve succeeded. Since 2005, I’ve written three successful books on meeting design and facilitation and over 800 weekly blog posts on a wide range of topics. About half a […]
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 […]
I’m concerned about the future of high-energy physics research. Fifty years ago, I worked on a ground-breaking high-energy physics neutrino experiment at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (better known as CERN) particle accelerator in Geneva. In July 1973, […]
I’m looking back on 2023. And, dear reader, get 20% off my ebooks until the end of the year! 2023 in review I slowed down in 2023. Before 2020, I was designing and facilitating around a dozen in-person meetings and […]
I joined the social media platform Mastodon a year ago. Given recent turbulent social media trends, I’m glad I took the plunge. Having been on Twitter (yes, I know it’s been renamed “X”, sue me) since 2009, I’d describe Mastodon as the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Strive to live in your own imagination, not someone else’s. Having written about the intersection of power and status at meetings, I appreciate what professor of African American studies at Princeton University Ruha Benjamin shares in this 2019 video: “The New Jim Code? Race, […]