Weekly inspiration #27: Redesigning conferences
Most of you won’t know this, and we ourselves have almost forgotten it too - but at the beginning, Sandbox was not a community; rather, it was supposed to be a conference, bringing together the world’s young talent in one place. We eventually moved away from this, because the idea of creating a community that is global and allows our members to meet and interact every day - instead of just a few days every year - made more sense to us.
Interestingly, lots of conferences around the world have also started to rebrand and rethink themselves as “communities”. One of them is LIFT in Geneva, one of our most favorite conferences. LIFT founder Laurent Haug recently gave an interview on his thoughts on the future of conferences. Inspired by this, here are our ideas on how conferences could and should change:
1. Create a community. Well, that one’s kinda obvious. Conferences bring together like-minded people; creating a community around it allows these people to connect also before and after the actual event, thus increasing the value they have from attending. I always try to contact people I want to meet before the conference starts; and if there is a lively online community (as for example LIFT has), this task becomes much easier.
2. Make networking a program feature. A lot of conferences try to cram as many speakers into one day as possible to make their program “attractive”. But the speakers are often enough not the most interesting thing at a conference - the networking is. I would love to see more conferences treat networking not just something that is done in the breaks, but something that needs to be actively facilitated. The Picnic conference in Amsterdam is doing a great job on this: In 2008, they had a “friendship beer machine”: A device that would print vouchers for free beer if, and only if, two people would simultaneously place their badges (which had RFID chips in them) on a heart-shaped reading device. Antoine and I spent quite some time there meeting new people over beers.
3. Scale down locally, scale up globally. It’s always nice if you can call your conference the “biggest industry conference” or similar. But size has its drawbacks: The events become impersonal and meeting people becomes time-consuming. Last year at LeWeb in Paris (which has around 2000 attendees), I spent a significant portion of my time looking for people. Conferences should therefore limit themselves in size and become “boutique events”. At the same time, they can expand their reach beyond their actual guests by making some or all of the content available on the internet or even allowing their community to host their own events (like TEDx and LIFT@home successfully do).
What are your ideas to redesign conferences? And what conferences are already incorporating some of these ideas? Let us know in the comments!
Nico is Head of Business Development at Sandbox. He is sad to miss this year’s edition of LIFT, but excited that Sandbox CEO Antoine will host a workshop and a dinner there, and highly recommends you go check it out.
On the 15. March 2010 at 20:35 o'Clock
[...] Sandbox » Blog Archive » Weekly inspiration #27: Redesigning conferences [...]