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Ride that – you must be joking!
Still skeptical that the peer conference can build an optimum program for your conference, a program that’s better than anything your program committee could come up with? Imagine you’d never seen a...
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The gift of listening
“Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time.” from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John Le Carré I was facilitating a...
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Helping conference attendees satisfy their curiosity
“Satisfaction of one’s curiosity is one of the greatest sources of happiness in life.” —Linus Pauling When I was a graduate student I used to dislike going to academic conferences. Despite having won...
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Giving conference participants just what they want
When I was an IT consultant I used to build custom database management systems—complicated, company-specific software that handled the unique way an organization did things. The normal way to do this...
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Three things conference attendees really want to know about each other
Connections with people are formed by our experience with them over time. (Yes, Buddhists and Taoists, the present moment is our only reality, but we still experience it through the filters of the...
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Should Linda go to TradConf or PartConf?
Ask me about an environment for learning and I recall sitting in a classroom full of ancient wooden desks, hinged lids inscribed with the penknife carvings, initials, and crude drawings of generations...
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Pair share—What’s on your mind right now?
Malii Brown Here’s an effective variant of pair share—a fundamental participative technique that fosters connection and learning via discussion with a partner during a conference session—that was...
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The best way to fundamentally improve your dull conference
I’ve been attending conferences for over forty years. Most of them are dull and largely irrelevant. This seems to be the norm, because when you talk to attendees you find they set a low bar for...
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Squaring the circle: creating room sets for connection
Meeting planners typically default to squaring the circle when specifying room sets. They persist in seating attendees in long straight lines whenever possible, ignoring the benefits of curved and...
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