A friend of mine in the facilitation world, Tree Bressen — along with Debby Sugerman and the Sunrise Facilitation collective — has written a paper about the Possibilities for Transformational Conferences.

Let’s assume that you are going to succeed at attracting 50-1000+ motivated, smart people from around the region or country to attend your conference, ok? As the convenor, you now have an amazing opportunity to engage and influence a large number of active and talented folks about an issue that is important to you. Inspiring speeches can energize attendees and spark new ideas, but that alone is not enough. There is nothing like active participation to prepare people to take what they have learned out into the world.

It covers a range of potential ways of including conversation and audience participation within ‘traditional’ conference formats.

Participatory Formats to put at the Middle or End of an informational presentation.

• Pause for Pairs
• Small Group Sharing
• Attendees Interview Each Other
• Panelist or Participant Fishbowl
• Panelist Circles

Participatory Formats to Supplement or Replace One-Way Presentations

• Storytelling
• World Cafe
• Representative Fishbowls
• Kinetic Spectrum (Spectrograom)
• Speed Dating
• Project Gallery (Speed Geeking)
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Open Space

I am really looking forward to this event. I was pulled in at the last minuet to facilitate the open space agenda creation process (I didn’t design the flow of the day). As part of the Planetwork Community I have been aware of Gil Friend’s work in this area for a while so it is nice to see the partnership he made with SUN to form OpenEco.

I am excited for the morning session – should be interesting how that conversation sparks ideas for sessions. I hope there is enough room – with 300 people expected and only 10 spaces for 4 sessions. We shall see.