Winding up at the Communications Network
by Michael HoffmanThursday, November 2nd, 2006
I am finishing up here at the Communications Network conference at the Kimpton Hotel Monaco in San Francisco. It has been fabulous. Not only are the people great, but the format of the conference allowed for maximum networking time. Bruce Trachtenberg, the Executive Director of the Communications Network said that in reviewing past conferences he found that people said they loved networking the best, and not having enough time to network the least. So why not make the whole conference networking?
The format of the conference was Open Space, which basically has the participants creating the conference schedule together, in the first hour. It sounds like chaos, but it worked. People stood up and proposed what they wanted to talk about. These ideas were written on paper then pasted on a board. Once everyone was done proposing, people came up and pasted small stickers on the sessions they were interested in. Certain overlapping sessions were combined, the sessions were put into rooms and time slots, and voila, a conference schedule.
