Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Contactivity was a series of experimental management ‘unconferences’ we ran with the KnowledgeBoard community and other partners over 2005 and 2006 when I was editor there. It came from our research interests to explore the power laws and knowledge exchange potential behind running events.

(Event poster image courtesy of Ton Zilstra)

We thought that the events we saw around us could benefit by taking the attendees’ interests and potential more seriously in the bigger context of real engagement. Most events you go to are not optimised for the attendees to effectively connect, share knowledge and create new knowledge and take that knowledge further; they are there to disseminate a few people’s take on the world.

We wanted to take that event model outside and give it a good thorough constructive disrupting.

These are some lessons learnt we identified after running the event series during 2005 and 2006. They form the final part of the chapter I co-wrote with Ron Dvir and Sami Kazi for KnowledgeBoard’s free community book “Hands on Knowledge co-creation and sharing: practical methods and techniques” which you can download from The VTT website (9MB .pdf file)

Since then, this stream of research has been carried onward and into the ‘real’ world by the Unbla team (with a fascinating research paper soon to be published), Jack Martin Leith and his associates, as well as forming part and parcel of my daily practices.

In parallel, it’s always worth considering David Wilcox’s advocation for more participatory conferencing as part of the engagement process, and David Gurteen’s patient education into how to make conferences more effective as knowledge transformation opportunities. I am sure there are many others out there.

So. When you decide to run an event in which you genuinely wish the particpants to participate actively, here are some things that we thought others might benefit from knowing:

Do these things:

1. Take risks – try new methods which were never done
2. Make the space welcoming – flowers and sweets on each table, for example, can make a difference
3. Use art – relevant pieces of art help to create a different state of mind and make new associations. Art can be used at the event website, invitation, documentation, on the walls at the event itself
4. Keep renewing, keep inventing – each event should introduce some surprises to people who were at the previous events
5. Balance serious conversations and fun activities. Content is critical – and the stimulating environment has to support knowledge sharing and creation
6. A major part of the event should be based on various forms of interactions – but it is OK to have few traditional frontal presentations – if they are of exceptional quality
7. Invite the participants to suggest interesting activities – this is the best way to ensure an innovative agenda
8. Welcome your participants as they arrive: they are the most valuable part of the event
9. Actively introduce your participants to each other: networking is the most important part of any gathering of people
10. If you choose to pre-energise your event with virtual engagement tools (wikis, blogs etc.) be prepared to facilitate them
11. If you pre-energise your event with virtual tools make sure that the energy and knowledge gathered on the tool is carried over to the physical event; otherwise it is a waste of everyone’s time
12. Share the creative and logistic responsibility of the event and have regular team meetings during the event

Don’t do these things:

1. Avoid too intensive an agenda – fewer and longer sessions and activities as well as longer breaks will ensure better use of the participants’ time
2. If you do not reach topic consensus online before the event (we tried this) have a plan B!
3. If you use new technologies (wiki), keep the necessary interactions as simple as possible attendees
will have a range of experience in the area and new users can be very intimidated by new technologies
4. Do not underestimate the amount of facilitation you may need to do in advance of the event attendees are, as yet, not familiar with this emergent practice and may need significant support
5. If you are using a pre-event virtual platform, ensure that there is only one sign-on procedure and it is exceptionally easy

There is much much more, but we had only had one book to fit it into. Running events is fun – and much more fun if you genuinely engage the participants.