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IdeasForInteraction2004

Ideas for Interaction at the Conference

This is a sort of brainstorming page for making the conference interactive in as many ways as possible. Here are some of the things we're thinking about or planning.

Please add your own ideas. If they're not self-explanatory, or need development, create a new wiki page for them.

We put 6 chairs near the back of the room and had 5 initial volunteers in them. The moderator was one of the five and proposed the initial question under discussion. Some debate ensued. Whenever someone in the audience had something to say they took up the empty seat and someone had to leave. If someone wanted to leave, they'd get up and someone from the audience would take up the spot (with the moderator filling the hole if no-one stepped forward).

What this led to was a small, intensely animated, yet clear discussion as only 5 people were trying to talk at once, but with a huge variety of viewpoints as anyone with something to contribute could make their contribution.

--AlanFrancis

I've been organizing and facilitating conferences as a sideline for about twenty years, and this recreational activity now seems to be turning into my fifth career, organizing and facilitating what I call PeerCenteredConferences. Essentially these are small (< 100 people) one to three day conferences for folks with a common interest. At least half of the conference time is used discussing issues, problems and solutions that attendees determine at the conference. I've developed (and am still refining) a conference process that:

• allows and encourages each attendee to share their reasons for attending, issues, problems & successes with the entire group. This is the first thing that happens at each conference, and it's what I'd like to see happen at AYE.
• provides a way for conferees to share whatever they want to talk about, plus mechanisms to create, schedule & facilitate focus groups that cover the popular topics.
• at the end of the conference offers a mini personal retrospective (thank you Esther; this developed directly from your 2003 AYE Reflection Leading to Action session!) I've found this to be simple and yet very powerful.

The conferences I've organized using the approach outlined above have had extremely good evaluations by the participants. A key part of the success is the early roundtable which gives everyone information about other attendees who they might want to get to know better.

I enjoyed AYE 2003 immensely, but only had significant conversations with maybe a third of the participants. Were there attendees that I would have enjoyed meeting, but didn't? I bet there were. I think an early roundtable would have helped me find them.

- AdrianSegar 2004.03.22

If this was ona common wall space with a ready supply of post-its nearby, we could build the timeline over the course of the conference as we passed. Perhaps we could meet to review it at the end of the conference ? --AlanFrancis 2004.03.23

And we did a fishbowl session last year, too. We used issues posed by people in the session as the panel topics. That was fun, too.

Esther