I am continuously amazed at just how BAD most presenters are at conferences. They put PowerPoint slides up with tiny print and tons of bullet points, which is more about the presenter having their notes available than assisting the presenter with compelling visual motifs to help the story along. And many presenters seem to spend so little time preparing that I often feel they should pay a tax of every wasted minute multiplied by the number of people in the audience.
But then I started watching archived TED Talks on iTunes and realized just how educational and informative presentations can be. So, how can we make all conferences as entertaining as TED? It’s clear that the organizers of TED put forth enormous effort in finding excellent presenters. I have an alternative proposal which I believe is far more scalable — distribute speaker selection [and room size] to the community who will actually attend the event.
1. Line up a few key presenters and begin pre-registration.
Conferences always start marketing and pre-registration with a small group of confirmed speakers. For annual conferences in particular, it would be relatively easy to get a core “seed” group for Step 2.
2. During pre-registration, allow attendees to propose topics and speakers of interest.
Give each attendee an allocation of points and have them “invest” in the speakers and topics of greatest interest. In addition to picking the topics and speakers of greatest interest to your audience, this will help you estimate audience size so that you can allocate rooms [based on size] to the right presentations.
3. Extend the conference currency to events.
Initially allow attendees to nominate events (e.g., dinners, parties, golf outings). Once you have a list of finalists, have conference attendees use their points to “buy” the events that matter most to them.
I’m convinced that giving attendees the power to organize conferences will make them much better.
5 Comments
June 3, 2008 at 3:04 pm
“.. giving attendees the power to organize conferences will make them much better.”
Agreed. And we see this in action at BarCamps.
Traditional, non-interactive presentations can be far better with better visuals and stories to engage people’s minds. Traditional presentations are a one-way dump of information (I’ve seen this happen even at BarCamps), and have to be really good to be better than the conversations created by interactions.
Perhaps it presenters are not going to spend the time to prepare they should spend no time at all and just provide structure and facilitate interactions, engage people’s minds AND mouths.
June 3, 2008 at 4:45 pm
This is hard when attendees procrastinate to register. We would end up giving an inordinate amount of influence to an unrepresentative minority.
June 3, 2008 at 5:17 pm
How do you know that they are unrepresentative? This implies an unequal distribution of interest based on registration time — not sure if that’s right, but doesn’t make intuitive sense to me. Certainly not relative to having a small group of organizers making last minute decisions…
June 3, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Yes, I worry about an unequal distribution of interest based on registration time.
I like the idea. Since I’m running events and speakers for a student entrepreneurship conference, I’ll push to try it out. Grappled with room sizing issues today, in fact! We’ll see if we can’t spin it as a promotion of some sort—”Register early, have your say.” I can’t find your email address anywhere—If you’re interested in the result, drop me a note and I’ll send you a follow-up in a few months.
June 4, 2008 at 5:39 am
Aran,
Fair enough. I assumed that there would be a near equal distribution in preferences for early and late registrants. That was an assumption, and it could be very wrong…
-Mike
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