Making a success out of a conference

Making a success out of a conference or special event that brings people together for a few hours or days is an objective which is not all that often achieved. As is well known, a wide range of technical and organizational skills are required to make them work, but there is also a matter of feel. Feel for people, what they bring to the table, the best way to get them to interact, how if at all to give them a running start, a feel for time (before, during and after) and how to ensure that the most important findings and relationships somehow persist and develop once the meeting has closed its doors, and how to maximize serendipitous encounters and new ideas and relationships that just may not have spring up if someone had not given the group a chance to meet and interact. Like most other seasoned international pros I have been involved in scores of meeting of different sizes, structures, and in different places. By and large, despite the money spent and the work earnestly invested, the results were, to be kind, less than optimal. The main reason for failure: insufficient respect of those whose time is involved and as part of that simply an insufficient feel for people. To make the event succeed, you basically have to like people and to have the gift of being able to put yourself in their place, almost minute by minute. My own point of departure concerning these meetings, and in this the larger usually the worse, is that they are almost always planned with insufficient attention to making best use of the time and brains of the people who are being brought together. All too often, at the end of the event the main accomplishment is that most of those brought together survived the encounter and find themselves a few hour or days older -- and not a great deal more. I have however had the good luck to have been involved in a number of events which have come close at least to achieving their ambitious objectives, and as both an participant, organizer or even a quasi-passive delegate, I have had the opportunity to observe and learn from these experiences. And to apply these lessons to my own work. In the second half of this page, I describe briefly a handful of events that I have had a role in organizing and supporting, which I hope will give the reader a better feel for the kinds of approaches which I feel are needed to ensure real interaction and success (which is that as far as I am concerned the only reason to bring people together at high cost as in these cases, is because you want to make something happen. And when the agenda is related to sustainable development and social justice, this is an important and worth goal. My interest is in creative participation, if possible from the beginning of the project, in making these events memorable and successful. I have applied these lessons to large conferences with the UN, OECD, European Commission and both private and public sector groups in many parts of the world, and I am eager to have more such creative associations, on the condition that the topics under discussion are related to my own established expertise and interests. As a final wrinkle in this introduction, let me mention my particular interest in using sate of the art technology both to prepare for, to accompany, and to permit creative post event follow-up and actual implementations of the lessons leaned and the relationships forged. This extends of course to such things as interactive web sites (which need both careful design and painstaking and imaginative management to get it right) but also to a range of other communications technology including Webcasting and videoconferencing. The potential for creative use of these technologies is enormous, the cost increasingly affordable, and any major meeting that does not take advantage of trying to integrate them into the whole picture is probably not going to achieve its full potential. Back to top Some representative conferences and events In order to give you some feel for the approaches that I try to take in an attempt to get value for all involved in these events, I would like to present here a small handful of examples, more or less recent: EuroCarshare 2006: Message to Europe , Monaco, March/April 2006 The goal of this pioneering two day event in the Principality of Monaco was to mark the notable progress that carsharing has made as a practical means of sustainable transportation in Europe and the world in the last few years -- and at the same time to make a useful contribution to speed and enhance its development in cities across Europe. Euro Carshare 2006 had as its overarching goal to bring together in a single place for two lively days the top players working with carsharing as a fact, both as suppliers of services and technology and as users (this last mainly being the cities and groups who it is or could be serving). The context of the workshops was international, independent, neutral, and strongly experienced-based. They were not about research. They were about transport policy and practice: preparation, implementation, negotiation, and operation, with all of the fine grain details that it takes to make a success. A wide variety of approaches and visions of carsharing are being welcomed. Click here for full details on EuroCarshare 2006: Message to Europe. World Energy Technology Summit, Paris, February 2004 An example of my creative participation in a conference was in the 2004 World Energy Technology Summit organized here in Paris under the auspices of the World Technology Network in February. In addition to supporting the organizing team from the outset, I helped bring in highly qualified participants and discussion leaders, and took a role in organizing and leading the Interactive Panel on Financing Issues & Dilemmas. As usual in these cases (at least for me) I took the time to contact and speak with each of the panelists in advance in an attempt to make sure that when we got together physically for the first time, we had each of us done their part to ensure the success of the event. (Click here for more information on this, and here for a Webcast of my closing summary for that session.) At the end of the Summit, I was asked by the organizers to address the meeting and the closing Reflections Panel, summarizing my own views on the main accomplishments and lessons of our two days together. The presentation for this can be accessed in a Webcast here. My view of the Summit and its accomplishments: The organizers not only were able to bring together an interesting cross section of world level energy thinkers and doers, but also succeeded in giving them a good space over the two days to trade ideas, information and views. An especially appreciated post-meeting innovation was been their decision to develop a Webcast fo virtually all aspects of the two day meeting, including of the social events and numerous informal exchanges. The WTN is an organization that stresses the concept fo serendipity, and the organizers gave full play to the opportunities to put this valuable learning and relationship tool to work. Stockholm Partnerships for Sustainable Cities My association with the Stockholm Partnerships has spun out over several years, and over most of 2001 and the first half of 2002, I was busy just about full time in working with the Stockholm City team, both as president of the international jury and with the broader issues of project organization and support in cooperation with Adam Holmstrom, program manager. The Stockholm Partnerships Awards Ceremony takes place in the prestigious Blue Hall where the Nobel Prize Banquet takes place on the 10th of December every year. His Majesty the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, agreed to hand out the trophies at the Awards Ceremony. This aspect of the conference was outstandingly successful (thanks to the great professionalism of the organizers and of course the unique setting of the ceremonies. Another great accomplishment of the Stockholm project has been its use of interactive web and related communications technologies both to identify a very large number of nominated projects in many countries around the world, North and South, and to tie them all together in a common structure of information and potential for interaction. United Nations CarFree Day Program and Conference, Fremantle, Australia, May, 2002 This two day international event was jointly organized in May 2002 by the City of Fremantle, the United Nations and myself as representative of The Commons as the innovator of the original World CarFree Day program as well as the UN CarFree Day Programme. It combined a full schedule of the usual meetings, but also a hands-on carfree day demonstration on the streets of the city, a considerable accomplishment in itself. The event combined doing, learning and playing in highly creative ways, with both local and international participation as people came to this small Australian city to see how one group of people were ready to take on the challenge of doing something about the usual traffic impasse resulting from too many cars and too little space for people that is a characteristic of most of our cities world wide. An interesting wrinkle on the program was that it was organized entirely using state of the art communications between Paris and Fremantle (and the UN in New York), with the same videoconferencing technologies put to work in the course of the meeting. (One wrinkle worth recalling in this is that the earth does not stand still even for new technology, so the Paris presentations had to be made a 03h00 in the morning here, so that the timing of the organizers in Fremantle could be fully respected.) *       *       * Towards Sustainable Transportation OECD conference in Vancouver, Canada, 1996. To close out this short section, I thought it might be interesting to show you the first conference web site that we developed, this time for the 1996 OECD Towards Sustainable Transportation conference in Vancouver, Canada. Overall the conference was "well run" but it did not to the best fo my knowledge achieve much in concrete terms. We did make an effort however to bringing together a reasonable diversity of activists as well as policy makers and various transport and related experts. But the cocktail finally did not have much punch, It did give us a chance to develop our first web site in support of a physical meeting, and that was a good learning experience and useful enough in the context. It was also the first occasion that we built in videoconferencing for several speakers who participated from Brussels, a habit which we continue to make good use of to this day.     Home   About Translate   The Commons   Always On   Contact   Top Le Frene, 8/10 rue Joseph Bara 75006 Paris, France, Europe. T: +331 4326 1323 Copyright © 1994-2006 The Commons ® All rights reserved. Last updated on 15 April 2006