Gianfranco Chicco interviewed me last week about my vision of the future of conferences. Three main trends are appearing in my opinion:

Conferences need to be more porous

Lift takes place in Geneva, Marseille and Korea (Jeju) and there is no way that you should be penalized because you cannot follow us in one of the countries. It’s not that because you cannot afford to go to Korea that you should be cut from this conference … So now we are working on how we can, in a smart way, embed people from the outside inside a conference […] where you are doesn’t really matter. […] How do you handle that from a business perspective? How do they pay (or should they pay or not)?

Come back to the moment

There is a need to make the moment more unique, to make it more special and catch people’s attention because now everybody has their phones, and emails, etc. We need to go more to being like a theater, towards something that cannot really be captured with technologies (e.g. video registering a conference)… and if you’re not here, you really miss something!

Decentralization

Many conferences are growing into different areas (TEDx, Lift@Home, PICNIC Salon) […] Instead of considering yourself a conference you consider yourself a community. And the conference is actually a community that happens to meet together two, three days a year at a specific location. […] How do you allow your community to meet without you? How do you allow your community to extend itself and reach new people through the people that are already members? How do you control what’s happening outside and how much do you want to control it? […] It’s like a Tupperware development of conferences where your conference is actually a recipe, it’s a set of values, it’s some processes,  it’s a way to approach things, it’s a community. How do you allow that to have it’s own existence and develop itself? As a conference organizer you cannot grow your model eternally. Lift works because we have 1,000 people but it would not work with 10,000 people. So how do you grow and how do you sustain with all of these constraints? I think one of the ways is to decentralize, lose control and let your community flow with your ideas and carry these ideas and values further.

Link (with video interview)

Here is the video (in French) of my recent talk at CreaDigital. It was fun to prepare and give, I hope you enjoy it as much as me :)

I am discussing:

• The new interfaces
• The current transition of media
• Business models
• The new multipolar web
• Cultural / generational differences
• Buzz
• Digital footprint
• Managing openness

Slides here.

Quick link to a study I was invited to join alongside a diverse bunch 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 weird as it seems - a true passion of mine ;)

Leading industry players including ICCA and IMEX have signed up as project sponsors and contributors to Fast Future Research’s Convention 2020 strategic foresight study.

The research programme is designed to take a wide ranging and strategic perspective on the future of live events, venues and meeting destinations. A TrendWiki has also been set up, allowing people to enter their own views on the ideas, trends and issues that will shape the future of events. Full details can be found on the at www.convention-2020.com

Link

It’s one of the questions I am asking myself, after seeing a huge drop in view counts all around the web. Most conferences are impacted, and it seems we are entering a new era where audiences are getting saturated of good content. Yes, because that is change number one: online videos do not mean crap anymore. Check the best talks of Lift, TED, Leweb, Picnic, all offer fantastic performances by some of the world best speakers.

Back in 2006, when Lift was one of the first conference to publish its content online free (people thought I was crazy back then, “killing the need to attend”), we would get ten of thousands of views on the talks of Scoble, Cory Doctorow or Bruce Sterling. Years later, a great talk gets 5000 views, like Queen Rania’s recent speech at Leweb, Gunter Pauli at Lift France 09 or Kevin Kelly at TEDxAmsterdam. A notable exception is TED, getting between 10 and 20′000 views on their videos thanks to the talent and hard work of the team led by Jason Wishnow, who edits all the talks (one to two per week) to make them as impactful as possible.

^{Vint Cerf at Lift09, one of my favorite Lift talk.}

Still, you can see a change there. Look at TED’s most popular talks: most date from two to three years ago. Yes they had more time to be seen, and that might explain the difference in view count. But we are comparing millions to thousands. There is a clear drop here too, even if the numbers remain above the pack.

So what happened? Maybe:

• Audiences are offered a huge choice, and almost all conferences are now sharing their talks online.  It is harder to stand out, and great content gets buried under the constant flow of information.
• The way views are counted has improved. I learned ten days ago from Julien Hory that Dailymotion counts a view only after a couple of minutes, a time determined as the average viewing time on the site. Before you reach that mark, your view does not count. Cruel, we are not used to this, but it probably gives a much better view of reality.
• Conferences are now spreading their videos on many platforms (Lift is on DailyMotion, Vimeo, Blip, Metacafe, Revver and Viddler to name a few), and the consolidated numbers are simply not available.
• Are 20 minutes talks too long? The average video length on Youtube is 2 minutes 46.17 seconds, we are used to shorter, more impactful content while online.

Overall, I raise this question because shooting videos at conferences is a huge investment (around 100′000$ for Lift), and I wonder if videos are still the smartest way to use that money. We could do so much (dinners, parties, gifts) with that money the question at least needs to be raised.

Another question is the one of live streaming the conference. Loic and Géraldine Lemeur got 200′000 people watching the live stream, much more than on the archived videos of this year’s edition. With time, the difference might become smaller - with the archive catching up on the live - but the gap is pretty impressive. Audiences seem to want to content now, not later. And they are the ones calling the shots. Time to evolve again?

Hum, 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 around.