6 Month Meeting Planning Lag
Traditional meeting planning processes often require that a session proposal be submitted six months before the event will actually be held. Given the speed with which our world changes today, that strikes me as an unacceptably long time in which to lock-in the majority of your event’s content. Certainly, some content must be planned that far out but it is really necessary to do so for everything?
There have been many recently developments in events for technical audiences, where a high level theme is established for a meeting but then the content to be presented is decided upon by the participants themselves, on site at the meeting. How do they get speakers, you may ask? They are the attendees themselves. This kind of conference model, called an unconference, allows the event to be as closely matched to the interests of the participants as they can.
Associations should explore adapting this model if they want to empower their meetings participants to be a critical part of the experience of their event.
Another possibility would be to do what you are doing with your book–put out a beta version of the program with topics you think will be of interest six months out, and let potential attendees, speakers, etc., comment and update the topics up until the day of the conference. That way, you can have a plan in place and still ensure that the content will be fresh and interesting, and speakers can target the information much more effectively. While I love the unconference thing, I don’t think many associations would be comfortable in taking that big a leap. This might be a reasonable compromise.
That would be a great first step, Sue! I like the idea a lot. If an association can bring themselves to try that and it works well then it would probably lead to more of an unconference event down the road.
One trick would be that the speakers must be willing to adapt their presentations based on what the participants push back on. If they aren’t then it would likely do more harm than good.
I’d make speaker flexibility a condition of speaking at the conference. I find it hard to imagine that a speaker wouldn’t want to be as relevant and interesting as possible to the participants, but if there are some out there like that, well, that’s not who I’d want speaking at my meeting.
[…] That’s what the good folks over at We Have Always Done It That Way are proposing: That meeting organizers shouldn’t line up all their sessions six months before the conference, but just let the topics to be covered bubble up from the attendees on-site, and let the attendees be your speakers (a relatively new concept called the unconference). While I think this would work for some, mostly small, conferences, I can’t see it happening for a major scientific convention, or other types of meetings where people do want to hear the latest breakthroughs from those who do the breaking-through. […]