Tech Stream

The Future of Conferences

15 May 2009

The Future Tense program this week have been looking at the changing nature of conferences:

The word ‘conference’ is synonymous with bad food, hard chairs and boring speakers. At least it is for many of us. But it doesn’t have to be that way and, in fact, it’s already changing. We speak with three conferencing professionals about conferences past and future and the way the industry is adapting to meet changing consumer expectations.

You can listen and download the audio from the program or read the transcript.

I’ve been thinking a lot about conferences for the past three days. CeBIT Australia 2009 was the first such event I’d been to for some time, and a lot has changed with regards to how people involve themselves, how technology is used for interaction between the speakers and the audience, or how the events are even structured and how outcomes and decisions made are shared with the wider public.

At CeBIT for example they had a display in all the conference rooms of comments from twitter, harvested using the appropriate # tags. So for the Webciety area you could post your thoughts on twitter and add #webciety and have your comment displayed on the screen. Check the Tech Stream twitter feed for an example from yesterdays final session on the future of the web #cebitweb.  This is not just a gimmick, its a powerful way for people to interact and feedback what they are thinking or hearing to those both in the conference and the “outside” world.

I was speaking with a guy at CeBIT called Samuel Yeats who runs a company called UltraServe. We’ll hear from him next week on the program because he’s working on some interesting cloud computing solutions for businesses. And he’s also organising an “unconference” around cloud computing in Sydney. It will work on a format similar tothe recent Barcamp Hanoi in Vietnam. An agenda is created as the event takes place, everyone is expected to present their thoughts and encouraged to interact and share their experience at the unconference using online social media tools.   I think we’re going to see more of these type of events taking place, and the best thing is that those of us not invited or able to attend the actual event can still participate. The world really is getting smaller.