Today’s meetings need to give meeting-goers many options, not just a few. But this doesn’t mean filling the conference program with every conceivable session topic. To be enjoyable and productive, meetings need white space: free time for attendees to do what they want and need to do.
When we preschedule an entire conference program, each attendee’s only remaining choice becomes which sessions to attend. It’s like how the news industry uses polls, as described by Jeff Jarvis:
“Polls are the news industry’s tool to dump us all into binary buckets: red or blue; black or white; 99% or 1%; urban or rural; pro or anti this or that; religious (read: evangelical extremist) or not; Trumpist or not; for or against impeachment. Polls erase nuance. They take away choices from voters before they get to the real polls, the voting booth. They silence voices.”
—Jeff Jarvis, Polls subvert democracy
Predetermined meeting programs silence attendees’ voices in the same way.
So how do we give meeting-goers many options without taxing their stamina and powers of concentration?
Use event crowdsourcing to give attendees the right options!
Event crowdsourcing allows participants to create the sessions that they want and need. Opening techniques such as The Three Questions; Reminders, Sparks, Questions, Puzzles; Peer Session Selection and Sign-up; and Post it! For Programs make it possible to create conference programs at the event that truly reflect participant desires. Every session created this way is virtually guaranteed to be of interest to attendees because they chose them earlier in the event!
Event crowdsourcing thus avoids the two biggest problems endemic to traditional meetings: not including the sessions that attendees actually want and need, and overwhelming attendees with too many choices crammed into an exhausting schedule.
I have been using event crowdsourcing at conferences for decades. The programs that it constructs are invariably well-received and highly rated. Participants love being actively involved in choosing what they want to learn and discuss, and they typically uncover great session topics that were not on anyone’s radar before the event.
So if you want to give meeting-goers many appealing choices, use event crowdsourcing at your meetings. More information on my comprehensive event crowdsourcing manual is available here.
Want to get a taste of my new book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need? Here are some Event Crowdsourcing free chapters for your enjoyment.
Buy Event Crowdsourcing (ebook or paperback or both) at the lowest possible price here!
What’s the book about?
The book explains both program and session crowdsourcing: how to routinely create conference programs that reliably include the right sessions and the session content attendees actually want and need. There is some overlap between this book and my earlier book, The Power of Participation. But Event Crowdsourcing includes new techniques, plus significantly more critical details and enhancements. (The enhancements to my core technique The Three Questions, alone, justify getting this book.) If you want to create events that are far more responsive to participant wants and needs than the dominant unconference paradigm — Open Space — this is the book for you!
For an excellent summary of the work I do, check out this interview and podcast, Creating Conferences That Work by Celisa Steele of Leading Learning. The podcast recording is nicely summarized in the show notes, so you can just read about what interests you, and then listen to any or all of the interview sections from the links on the page.
Here’s an overview:
The six major reasons that conferences need to evolve from the traditional events we’re all used to.
What a peer conference is.
The Conference Arc: why conferences need to have a process-based beginning, middle, and end.
What event crowdsourcing is, and why it’s so important.
Integrating peer conference process into a traditional conference.
Creating Conferences That Work with Adrian Segar is a great introduction to why meeting planners and designers need to incorporate participant-driven and participation-rich design into their events. Recommended!
Here’s a teaser: the introduction to my book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need. Interested? Then buy the book!
Curiosity
I’ve always been curious. I’ve always wanted to understand the world I found myself living in.
As a child growing up in England, I was driven to study physics, the most fundamental science. Physics was a way of looking at the world that perhaps had the greatest chance of explaining the mysteries of the universe to me. By the age of twenty-five, I had worked on a key neutrino experiment at CERN, the European particle accelerator, and received a Ph.D. for my efforts.
But a funny thing happened along the way. I became increasingly curious about people. The neutrino research was a collaboration of eighty scientists and hundreds of support personnel from five different countries. The social and cultural differences that shaped our frequent meetings fascinated me. Heated discussions about how we should proceed and whose names should go on our journal articles flared and sputtered. I marveled at the energy scientists poured into the politics of their work. Their passions frequently distracted and detracted from the science we were exploring.
Understanding people
Understanding people better became important to me. I immigrated to the United States after falling in love with Vermont, a rural state with no opportunity to continue the big-lab science path I’d been traveling. I embarked on a series of careers that increasingly integrated my technical background with working with people: owning and managing a solar energy business, teaching computer science at a liberal arts college, and consulting in information technology.
As a consultant I worked with hundreds of organizations, discovering that the “technical” problems they had asked me to solve were fundamentally people problems. Over and over again I found myself talking with senior executives on managerial issues. This was a far cry from what I had been ostensibly hired to do.
I also found myself drawn to creating conferences about everything I was doing, both professionally and in my community, and I founded a couple of non-profits along the way.
I loved this work. (Still do.) In 1992, I developed a new conference format. No experts were invited in advance to speak. Instead, the value of the event grew from effectively tapping the shared expertise and experience of everyone present.
My first meeting design books
During the ensuing years, I wrote two books (Adrian Segar’s books) to share what I’d learned from designing and facilitating hundreds of conferences:
Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love(2009) detailed my reinvention of conferences using the participant-driven event process I’d developed for over fifteen years. Since publication, I’ve released important free updates that improve and extend the book’s peer conference model.
The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action(2015) offered an extensive tool chest of processes that further improve significant learning by supporting fruitful connection, meaningful participation, concrete outcomes, and building community at meetings.
Even as I published The Power of Participation, I noticed interest growing in designing meetings that included topics and issues chosen by attendees at the event. Meeting owners were discovering that predetermined sessions weren’t adequately meeting attendee needs. They wanted to know how to make their conference programs include the most valuable in-the-moment topics, rather than the best guesses of a program committee.
So I wrote this introduction to event crowdsourcing.
It’s a guide to designing conferences and sessions that become what attendees actually want and need them to be.
I call this event crowdsourcing, and as you’ll see, it includes much more than simply picking good topics to discuss.
Event crowdsourcing, done right, ensures that attendees will be enthusiastic about the content and value of your events and sessions. Whether you’re a presenter who knows the importance of meeting the actual wants and needs of your audience, or a conference stakeholder eager to grow your event by making it the very best it can be, event crowdsourcing is an essential ingredient of an effective and successful session and conference.
Introduction to my new book Event Crowdsourcing
What I share in this book is not rocket science. It doesn’t require any expensive technology. I’ve designed and facilitated hundreds of events using nothing more than standard A/V, pens, paper, and index cards. Typically, my clients hire me to “show them how it’s done” the first time, and then incorporate what they’ve learned into future events themselves.
I’m excited about the potential for event crowdsourcing to fundamentally improve just about any meeting. So this book is my attempt to convince you to try it and to support your effort every step of the way.
Finally, remember that reading this introduction to my new book Event Crowdsourcing is only the beginning. If what you read stays in your head, it will benefit no one. If you’re serious about significantly improving your meetings, you’ll need to put into action what you read here. When you do, you and your attendees will reap the benefits!
Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need
I’m happy to announce that my third book Event Crowdsourcing will be released this Fall. It covers a fundamental yet neglected topic: creating meetings people actually want and need.
My research has shown that over half the sessions offered at traditional preplanned conferences are not what attendees actually want! Event crowdsourcing allows you to create meetings where attendees want and need every session.
Who should buy this book?
Are you a meeting planner/designer who wants to create the best possible meetings for your clients? Then you need this book!
Are you a presenter who knows the importance of meeting the wants and needs of your audience? Session crowdsourcing ensures that your sessions will reflect the real-time needs of those who attend.
Are you a conference stakeholder eager to grow an event by making it the very best it can be? When attendees are enthusiastic about your event because it meets their wants and needs, they recommend your event to their peers and return year after year. As a result, your event grows, continually adapting to the changing desires of your participants, and your event and organization communities strengthen over time.
Are you an attendee who tires of events full of irrelevant pre-planned sessions? Event crowdsourcing ensures that you will be enthusiastic about the content and value of events and sessions.
Today’s meetings need to give meeting-goers many options, not just a few. But this doesn’t mean filling the conference program with every conceivable session topic. To be enjoyable and productive, meetings need white space: free time for attendees to do what they want and need to do.
For an excellent summary of the work I do, check out