Want to help write a book on conferences?
I am getting more and more involved in the meeting industry, helping others take their events to the level, giving talks at EIBTM or ICCA. I start to realize that the knowledge acquired through the organization of Lift is extremely valuable, coming from a fresh perspective, built on a community consistently challenging us to come up with innovative propositions.
As time passes, I am starting to think that a book would be a great way to avoid repeating the same things over and over again - read the book! - and take that conversation about events organization (a real passion for me) to the next level.
Inspired by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked conversations, stealing a page from Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur’s playbook, relying on the principles I have always applied to my work (collaboration and transparency), I am writing today to gauge interest from my readers and friends in such a project. Would you be interested in helping, contributing ideas and pointers to a dynamic text to be printed as a book? Would you be interested in reviewing chapters as they are written, discussing formats, pricing (see my post @ Lift today), community involvement, partners and speakers management, and more? I would love to turn this into a collaborative effort!
Contact me using the comments or on laurent@liftlab.com.
December 14th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Sounds like a very interesting idea. I would definitely like to be involved.
December 14th, 2009 at 5:52 pm
5 positive answers in 4 hours, that’s a good start :) My plan:
- wait and see who wants to help
- setup a community of some sort
- validate plan with community
- start writing, publish chapters in the open for review
- consolidate and wrap up book
- come up with some revenue sharing of some sort (or maybe a system I saw on another project: contributors can direct money to the charity of their choice)
December 14th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
No, not another book on how to do something. Share your experiences with the world? Yeah. Create a community, set up a wiki? Good stuff. But a book. Naah. Growing your own tomatoes will certainly have a higher ROI. :-)
December 15th, 2009 at 5:23 am
Looking forward to reading your book and getting involved on the way. Cool!
December 15th, 2009 at 9:30 am
@Hermen: I follow the audiences, and believe me in the meeting industry a book is a good start :D
@Alex: maybe you want to tell a word about books ROI, how’s the out-of-stock thingy going?
December 15th, 2009 at 10:09 am
That’s a fine challenge and I sincerely hope it will meet success like this, we can offer it to some people in Geneva and may be, may be, they can boost more our city into more conference and events instead of just living on vanishing past glory …
If ever I can help, you now know that you can count on my experience.
December 15th, 2009 at 10:45 am
I’m currently organizing an academic conference and such a book would surely help me. Regarding community work and having your chapters reviewed, it worked great for Alex and Yves (look who’s commenting your posts) and I’m sure it will be the same for you.
December 15th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Sure, I’d love to contribute and share my experience working at Lift!
December 17th, 2009 at 12:06 am
15 contributors from 7 countries, representing Lift, Picnic, World Economic Forum, TEDx, Going Solo, etc… Quite an interesting list of people that I expect to grow with the cross post I’m about to do on Liftconference.com
December 17th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Great idea Laurent! There’s a lot of valuable lessons to be learned on how to organize these kind of things. As part of the organizing team of Mobile Monday Amsterdam (largest MoMo worldwide) we’d love to particpate. We’re always trying to up the ante for our own event on others that we helped organizing (been involved in many other events such as TEDxAms, multiple devcamps/unconferences).
Let us know how we can participate! You can reach us via http://www.mobilemonday.nl or on Twitter: @vangeest @marcfonteijn @panman @samwarnaars and @mdbraber!
December 17th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Hi,
Great idea!
As co-founder/co-organizer of different offline events like Mobile Monday Amsterdam, TEDx Amsterdam, Vodafone Mobile Clicks and different mobile devcamps I would love to share my future vision of offline events.
Offline will become more important as IRL contacts are scarce/more scarce. The future will be self organisation, bottom-up formed structure, emergence, instantiation, smart mobbing, flocking. Focus on loosely coupled alliances within events with high end creation tools and inspiration/creativity. The future will be:
- more immersive (see Joseph Pine II on transformations/experiences)
- more surprises/wild cards in any form (process, context, content, form)
- more radical transparency (see Chris Anderson) in terms of event organization (co-creation of lead users/attendees in core organizational structure)
- more about real-time creating of not only digital but also physical stuff (FabLabs/3D printers > results of events will be physical output/products, totally instant and spontaneous)
- more about real-time feedback loops on different senses/levels (physical computing, sensors, twitter, FourSquare, sentiment analysis)
- more participatory than even the most co-creative event at this moment
- more (pre-)selection on quality as all will be transparent in the cloud, incl. speakers and their performance/track record
- more focus on emotions/inspiration
- more focus on unanswered and complex questions with more societal value (citizenship, global brain, global awareness, public good)
More in my post later if you allow me ;)
Cheers,
Yuri van Geest
December 17th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
Nice, more people coming in!
December 18th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Hi Laurent, what a great idea!
One thing that might help in this open process is an open question. Is the question specifc to conferences, or is is more broad as gathering people implies. As a company who is focusing on open design process we’d be very interested in being involved, and can share some insight from the business model generation project.
Looking forward to hearing more
December 18th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
count me in, would love to help!
December 19th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Great idea count me in!
December 20th, 2009 at 11:04 am
I’ll add the “yes!” I gave you on Facebook here so that it’s visible to the world. Clearly, very exciting project, and a topic I’m personally interested in (between organizing Going Solo and working on official blogger programmes for events).
Count me in :-)
December 20th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Hi, sounds great to me as well, as I am thinking/planning a (bar)camp about conference, festival and barcamp making anyways, especially interested in the exchange with art curators (open curating) or film and theater directors (they should know how to organize dramatic structures).
cheers clemens (working for www.re-publica.de and www.transmediale.de)
December 22nd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
Hey / Salut Laurent,
Je n’ai fait que traduire le John Battelle “The Search” (”La Révolution Google”). J’adorerais participer au tien.
I only translated “The Search”, John Battelle’s seminal essay. I would love to participate to yours.
Dov
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
[…] that will be one interesting chapter for the book on conferences I am starting with the help of 30 (and counting) of the most innovative conference organizers […]
December 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I’d be up for this, Laurent.
Since September 2007, i’ve run over 40 events in 40 different venues. Constantly experimenting with formats.
A few write ups from others:
http://isthiswisdom.blogspot.com/2009/10/carry-on-up-network-best-network-event.html
http://www.modcommslimited.com/blog/2008/10/the-future-of-mobile-communication/
http://truebusiness.co.uk/2008/11/24/what-sort-of-person-are-you-then/
http://www.internalcommshub.com/open/news/pechakucha.shtml
If you’ll have me?
Cheers,
Matt
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:07 pm
i’m interested - i’ve been involved in the production of books and magazines, and am busy organising an Interaction Design conference to take place in June/july.
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Quick update:
40 contributors so far, representing the following conferences:
Picnic
TEDx (Amsterdam, Geneva, etc)
World Economic Forum
Lift
Barcamp
Going Solo
Vodafone Mobile Clicks
Mobile Monday
Interaction Design conference
Academic conferences
The Next Web
ICCA
Re-publica
Transmediale
Pretty good mix, and it should grow even more in the near future as I’ll ping Reboot, DLD, Leweb, Shift, TED, and the other cool conferences. I’m starting to think about the process, and will check collaborative writing possibilities of Google Wave, Google Docs, Ning and Drupal.
December 26th, 2009 at 1:35 am
Very interesting idea you have.
I’m the Program Chair for Content Strategy Forum 2010 in Paris, and help significantly with many other strategic aspects of the conference as well. I’m already in talks with people about making the Forum an annual event in Europe in some way or another, so I expect to be involved in conference organization more as time goes by. I would be happy to participate in your project, and learn greatly from the experience in return.
-dw
@Wion
@stcfrance
Program Chair,
Content Strategy Forum 2010 - Paris
December 28th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
count me in. would love to be involved…Best. Rupert @rupertrup
January 29th, 2010 at 9:44 pm
[…] of people, to explore the future of conventions in 2020. This comes at a moment I am deploying growing efforts to get more involved in the meetings industry, after finding out that designing events is - as […]
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:25 pm
Hi Laurent
I’d be delighted to contribute something. As you know we are running a global study on the future of events at www.convention-2020.com and would be happy to contribute some of the insights and issues emerging from that study.
Regards
Rohit Talwar
February 14th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
Count me in too ;-)
I’m currently working for PICNIC, Frontiers of Interaction and other smaller events. A past at the World Business Forum and others here and there :-)
I had started something similar with the series of interviews “The Future of Conferences” on www.conferencebasics.com
cheers!
gian