A rare opportunity! Hosted by CSAE Manitoba, this free one-hour online Participate Lab will introduce you to the design of participation-rich events through the direct experience of participatory meeting techniques and formats. All are welcome to attend this event at no charge (both CSAE members and non-members).
We’ve known for a long time that lectures are terrible ways to learn. Today’s attendees are no longer satisfied sitting and listening to people talking at them. If you want to hold meetings where effective learning, connection, and engagement take place, you need to build in authentic and relevant participation.
Our time together at this Participate Lab will cover:
Why creating participation-rich meetings is so important.
Human spectrograms: a simple tool for learning about other participants.
The Conference Arc:
Building connection while uncovering wants, needs, and resources.
Creating the right program.
Consolidating learning.
Facilitating individual and community growth.
Ask Adrian Anything: using a fishbowl sandwich to facilitate group discussion on meeting design and facilitation.
This workshop is limited to 100 attendees, so register now!
Here’s a rare opportunity to ask me anything about meeting design and facilitation at a unique, free, online workshop. Join me next Thursday, March 10th, 2022 at 12:00 pm EST for Ask Adrian Anything (AAA): an online participant-driven workshop on the future of events.
Though the central core is the AAA session, this is an active learning workshop. During it, you’ll experience some of the practices I use to support and build participant learning, connection, engagement, and community.
How long will the workshop last? That’s up to you! I’m willing to keep it going as long as you have questions and concerns to share. When it’s over, you’re welcome to stay and socialize online, and I’ll stick around for informal chats.
If you want to join us, it’s important you’re ready to begin at 12:00 pm EST.We’ll open the workshop platform at 11:45 am EST so you’ll have time to do the usual camera/microphone online setup boogie for a prompt start at noon EST. We’ll meet online, using Gatherly [1, 2], a platform designed for online social interaction and learning. [Apart from being a fan, I have no affiliation with Gatherly, and am donating my services.] The Gatherly platform will allow us to learn about each other and about top-of-mind issues, concerns, and questions through small group work, human spectrograms, and fishbowl discussion.
Ask Adrian Anything
This is an opportunity for you to experience one of my participant-driven workshops. You’ll learn through doing, both about other participants and how to implement what you experience into your own events.
Experience a participant-driven online event.
Learn by doing participant-driven methods that increase event engagement, connection, and community.
Meet, workshop with, and learn from other event professionals.
Take this opportunity to ask Adrian anything about meeting design and facilitation.
Enjoy time after the session in an online social environment that closely mimics meeting in-person socials. You’ll be able to find folks you’d like to talk with and hang out one-on-one or in small groups for public or private conversations.
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!
After years of trying many tools, here are my two favorite free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations if you’re not a graphics wonk. (Note: I am not a graphics wonk.)
I’ve written over eight hundred posts on this blog over the last fourteen years. As they tell you in SEO School, every post has at least one image. I often find an appropriate image on the web, but sometimes I feel inspired to create a graphic that fits better.
In addition, I frequently present at meeting industry events and to clients. Good presentation graphics can help communicate what I’m trying to say and strengthen my message.
Are you also “not a graphics wonk”?
I think there are a lot of people like me who have difficulty easily creating even simple graphics. My problem is that I simply don’t use “professional” graphics creation tools enough to be able to reliably memorize the variety of techniques, tools, and processes needed to speedily turn what I visualize into reality.
My graphic designer, whom I happily hire for complicated stuff, can quickly create perspective drawings, remove unwanted photo elements, and tone down someone’s bright clothing. For me, attempting any of these things takes a few hours on the web figuring out how, and making lots of mistakes along the way. The next time (if ever) I want to repeat the process I’ll have likely forgotten how to do it.
The graphics creation software I use most frequently comes free with Apple devices: Keynote.
Apple pitches Keynote as presentation software, and it’s an excellent tool for that. But it also has all the desirable features I listed above, so it’s perfect for quickly putting together a blog post graphic from a few external images plus some internally generated vector graphics and text. The alignment capabilities are especially nice: Keynote often seems to read my mind and pop up just the alignment guide(s) I might need.
I store a library of all my graphics in a single Keynote document, one slide per graphic. It’s easy to scroll through the slides and find an old graphic that can quickly be copied onto a new slide and modified as needed. Exporting a slide to a high-resolution jpeg (well, high enough for web or presentation purposes) is straightforward.
One feature it doesn’t have is rotating objects a precise amount (flipping horizontally or vertically is included). I occasionally need rotation capabilities for creating more complex (for me) graphics like a circle of chairs. If you need this capability, check out my bonus suggestion below.
For creating the kinds of graphics I’ve described, this software just works. The user interface is intuitive; I’ve never needed to research how to do anything I wanted to do. For the rare occasions I’ve attempted something (by my standards) really complicated and been stymied, I use the suggestion below.
Anyone with a web browser can use the best tool I’ve found for quickly creating simple graphics online: Canva. The software has a free plan that has been perfectly adequate for my modest needs. The trick to using it is to ignore the features that you don’t need — the free and paid templates and the galleries of free and paid images. Instead, start with a blank custom-size graphic workspace and use the drag-and-drop editor with your own graphic elements and perhaps a few basic objects.
Here’s an example of a graphic I made with Canva:
A couple of logos and some lines, and bingo! another graphic for another blog post.
Canva is especially helpful for creating a custom-sized graphic that’s filled perfectly with your desired content. You can do this in Keynote, but it’s a bit more fiddly.
So there you have it. Two free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations. But wait, there’s more!
Bonus resources
To reward you for reading this far I want to mention two other invaluable graphics resources. They both cost money, but not very much.
For more complicated graphics I use OmniGraffle. Here’s an example of the kind of graphic that is easy to create in this program:
OmniGraffle shines working with vector graphics. Diagrams like the above are easy to create because the program supports “connected objects”. I also find the program useful for drawing event room sets when you have to start from a venue’s floor plans downloaded as graphics.
OmniGraffle Standard (the version I use) costs $149.99, though education and volume discounts are available. Pricey but when you need it it’s worth it!
Finally, there’s Noun Project. This gem describes itself as “Icons for Everything: Over 2 million curated icons, created by a global community”. For $39.99/year you get unlimited royalty-free large SVG & PNG icons arranged in a searchable catalog. Noun Project is perfect for icons that represent abstract concepts, like communication [3,029 icons]:
or passion [1,567 icons]:
If you read my posts regularly, you’re likely to recognize some of the graphics I’ve made using icons from this extensive and ever-growing collection. You’re likely to find what you need here. Recommended!
Got recommendations that make creating graphics a snap for the graphically challenged? Share them in the comments below!
Want to learn how to enable Verizon free call filtering? Read on!
Verizon now offers free call filtering, but enabling it can be incredibly frustrating! Many reviews complain that after downloading the Verizon Call Filter app, no option for the free version appears. Instead, you are only offered a free 10-day trial or the option to purchase a monthly subscription.
Here’s how to activate the free version of Verizon Call Filter
I found these instructions buried in a comment on the wonderful TidBITS website, posted by Paul7. I have cleaned up Paul’s explanation and added a couple of screenshots, but Paul deserves full credit for this solution.
The crucial step omitted from Verizon’s incredibly brief explanation of free call filtering activation is that if enrolling via the Call Filter App doesn’t work, you need to log in to My Verizon. Here’s what to do.
Go to My Plans & Services and select Manage Products & Apps. Or your menu might look like the image below, in which case go to Plan and select Add-ons and apps.
Click on the Get Products tab and the Premium Products option.
Scroll down until you find the Call Filter app and select the Call Filter Free option.
You’ll see a Checkout box where you can add Call Filter Free to the lines in your plan. Select the checkboxes next to the lines you want, and click Confirm Purchase.
On your phone, close the Verizon Call Filter app if it’s currently open. When you reopen it you’ll see that free call filtering has been turned on!
Paul notes that if you have more than two lines, you may have to go through this process multiple times since it only shows two lines at a time. Alternately, your My Verizon may offer this process for each device/line separately. If that’s the case, select each device in turn and repeat the above process.
Finally, follow the steps in Josh Center‘s helpful TidBITS article to enable Verizon Call Filter’s spam filtering.
That’s it! Did this work for you? Do you have comments/additions/corrections? Please share them in the comments below.
I’m happy to announce that a free 9,000-word update to my book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love is available!
Many improvements and refinements are included—the outcome of four years of feedback and experience since the book was published in 2009. Highlights include a long-awaited chapter on extending Conferences That Work to larger events, and important additions that make the established format (now tried and true for over twenty years!) even better.
Here’s a list of the contents:
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 Why did I write this supplement?
CHAPTER 2 What’s included?
CHAPTER 3 Acknowledgements
GENERAL CHAPTERS
CHAPTER 4 Avoid one-day peer conferences
CHAPTER 5 Running Conferences That Work with more than 100 participants
IMPORTANT IMPROVEMENTS
CHAPTER 6 Give people permission and the opportunity to take a break!
CHAPTER 7 Break up roundtables approximately every twenty minutes
CHAPTER 8 Make peer session determination more efficient
CHAPTER 9 Improve personal introspectives by running them in small groups
CHAPTER 10 How to choose what to do at a group spective
OPTIONAL IMPROVEMENTS
CHAPTER 11 Include a first-timers session for repeat events
CHAPTER 12 Consider implementing a buddy system
CHAPTER 13 Use shared Google Docs for roundtable themes and plus/delta sharing
CHAPTER 14 Have people stand while speaking during the roundtable
CHAPTER 15 Use alternate colors when recording on flip charts
CHAPTER 16 Focused discussion = fishbowl — and an alternative format
ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
CHAPTER 17 Consider using a conference app instead of a face book
CHAPTER 18 Consider running plus/delta with tape columns on the floor
CHAPTER 19 Use plus/delta as a tool for action
CHAPTER 20 Consider adding “Curious about?” column to plus/delta
MISCELLANEOUS TIPS
CHAPTER 21 Where to buy stiff 5 x 8 index cards
CHAPTER 22 A closing note about appreciations
The supplement, provided as a free ebook <pdf>, will be updated from time to time, and the latest version will always be available for free on this website. Comments and corrections are always welcome.
A rare opportunity! Hosted by CSAE Manitoba, this free one-hour online Participate Lab will introduce you to the design of participation-rich events through the direct experience of participatory meeting techniques and formats. All are welcome to attend this event at no charge (both CSAE members and non-members).
After years of trying many tools, here are my two favorite free easy ways to create graphics for blog posts and presentations if you’re not a graphics wonk. (Note: I am not a graphics wonk.)
