Facilitation used to be quite simple – you survey and define your demographic, and then you serve up the things that the demographic wants to see. These days though more people value diversity (of age, gender, but most importantly across dicliplines and topics) and that means we need new communication structures that move beyond the traditional broadcast format.
How many of us actually enjoy sitting in a lecture for hours and hours being drip fed information? Who wants to listen to a panel go on and on without engaging the group?
With really diverse groups you can’t predict what they want to see and hear, so you need an adaptive event format to provide the foundation for emergent conversation. We need to be space creators.
I have had the opportunity to play with a variety of event formats across The Hive, Creative Performance Exchange, provincial tours, Innovation Cafes and Eyeopener sessions at Deloitte, and more. This is in addition to participating in events like Jelly, Social Media Breakfast, Trampoline, and Hack Days.
The most recent was the Pre-Briefing Session for Govhack Melbourne that we hosted at Deloitte. Pete and I with Jeremy Yuille decided to run the event a week before it happened, and with a few days of promotion filled the room with a really diverse array of people – from professionals to students and ideas people to developers. The format we used was inspired by a session Shawn Callahan facilitated recently at the CPX.
On the tables we had strips of paper each with a different government data source, and the people around each table would take them and physically mash them up to describe an idea for a potential new service. We did this for a few minutes before shuffling the tables to mix up the groups, before going around with another round of similar conversations. This was of course aided by beer and pizza, brain food and lubrication for the neurons!
After two rounds of discussion we got everyone to stand up and then put their hand on the shoulder of the person who shared the most interesting idea. What happened in the next 10 seconds was pretty amazing – an instant human visualisation formed in front of us. Realtime social filtering and collective intelligence. It is easy to visually identify the most connected nodes in the structure, and then we asked those people to share their ideas with the whole group.
At the end of the session we had all come together and effectively summarised the masses of ideas to come up with the most interesting, as voted by the collective.
What effective and emergent event formats have you seen in action?
By Ross Hill - November 12th, 2009 at 6:39am with 519 views
