What If Association Meetings Became Open Source? 10 Tips For Planning A Living Conference

What if your professional association offered an open source meeting?

What if association leaders redesigned the organization so that the focus was on social systems and morphing into Association 2.0? What if conference planners decided to adopt underlying principles of Web 2.0 to create Conference 2.0? What if your professional association embraced the following concept: “We serve our members best by serving our industry first.”

The Living Conference: Connecting people all year long both virtually and face-to-face.

How would you feel about that? Would you still pay membership dues?

So what is open source? Wikipedia says, “In technology, open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to software’s source code. The open source model of operation and decision making allows concurrent input of different agendas, approaches and priorities, and differs from the more closed, centralized models of development. The principles and practices are commonly applied to the peer production development of source code for software that is made available for public collaboration.”

Traditional association conferences convey knowledge via overwhelmingly controlled face-to-face experiences for paid registrants only. Members who cannot attend the event due to costs, schedule conflicts or other reasons are not able to engage with the conference’s content, knowledge or experiences. Often associations even go as far as saying that the presentations offered at their event are copyright-protected and cannot be shared or viewed unless one wants to pay an additional fee.

I believe that associations and conference planners must consider new ways of providing services, meetings and event experiences or risk becoming obsolete. So what if an association took the open source method and applied it to the design and implementation of a meeting? What if a new breed of association leaders and conference planners decided to embrace open source meetings, the “Living Conference” and Conference 2.0? What would it look like?

Here are ten principles to consider when planning Living Conferences and open source meetings.

1. Move to an open source sharing of knowledge and content.
Today, networked, social or informal learning, contrastingly, is an “open source” culture that seeks to share openly and freely in both creating and distributing knowledge and content. Meeting organizers could intentionally create experiences that distribute knowledge and content to face-to-face and virtual attendees. The public at large could also be invited to collaborate.

2. Put people and community first, programs and services second.
Start with the end in mind and design your experiences around the organization’s year end goals. When choosing goals, begin with what will affect the community at large and how to sustain year-long community engagement efforts. Continually ask yourself, “Is this in the best interest of our broader community, the industry, and our members or is this in the best interest of our organization and a few that are willing to pay additional fees?”

3. Design conference and association learning experiences that are part of a year-long effort and not a one-time shot in the arm.
When designing experiences, think strategically about how meetings, events and learning meet association yearly goals. Intentionally plan to have these experiences impact the industry community at large and not just face-to-face attendees or only at one time of year. Engage attendees, members and non-members with discussion of the specific content and issues all year long. Design ways to extend the content before, during and after conferences.

4. Create conference learning experiences that are collective, democratic and egalitarian.
ABL: Always Be Learning as David Armano calls it. Individuals learn anywhere, anytime, and with greater ease than ever before. Learning today blurs lines of expertise and tears down barriers to conference registration or face-to-face experiences only. Conference organizers should plan experiences that allow for collective collaboration around issues and topics.

5. Include both knowledge authority experts and collective collaborative facilitated presentations.
There is a growing complexity of collaborative and interdisciplinary learning taking place via the social web and informal learning. Reliance on certified experts presenting content is no longer the only acceptable practice at a conference. Conference planners face an audience used to a variety of ways of learning from traditional lectures to collaborative networked learning. Finding people skilled at facilitating discussions and not controlling the conversation is a must.

6. Create horizontal structures and formats.
Traditional association learning and conference presentations require top-down teaching. Today’s learning is collaborative, and attendees and association members work on sharing experiences and knowledge together. They multi-task and provide solutions with each other. Often attendees want to spend more time talking with others about their own issues and learnings than sitting passively listening to a presenter.

7. Using participatory learning and digital delivery provides new ways to engage new audiences.
Traditional conference’s model of attendee experience and learning rely on a hierarchy of expertise, restricted content to those who can afford to attend the face-to-face event, and disciplinary silos. Open source meetings would break down these authoritative models.

8. Design conferences and events for lifelong learners and move from knowledge sharing to helping people identify new ways to learn and judge information.
Association members face rapid change in today’s digital world. They are constantly confronting new findings and must adapt at record paces. Learning never ends. Equipping people to learn how to judge reliable information and sources, and shift from memorizing content to discovering how to learn, is critical.

9. Change conference room layouts to enable attendees to communicate virtually with those outside the conference walls.
This means providing tables for laptops, adequate electricity, free WiFi, proper lighting and encouraging others to share the information they are learning. It also means scheduling times for onsite attendees to intentionally communicate with virtual audience.

10. Conference planners should recruit known bloggers to attend the event and ask them tweet or blog during the meeting.
These people are experienced at tweeting during a conference and engaging virtual attendees. They’ve developed a skill engaging in virtual dialog with others. They can help associations extend the reach of the conference’s content to new audiences.

These are a few new principles for redesigning events and conferences and creating open source meetings and events.

What other principles do you think should be added?