Organizing conferences is madness: You work on them for months, maybe longer. Then the big day comes and all mistakes that you have made in the last months will become apparent, and now it’s too late to avert damage. Some days later it’s all over.

Organizing a good conference is extremely gratifying. Organizing a bad one is plain frustrating.

The difference between a good and a bad conference is often planning. Here’s a handful of lessons learnt from this week’s endeavour:

1. Visualize the end result. Imagine you are a participant – what do you need (information, material, services)? Imagine a speaker or workshop organizer. How about press? Write everything down.
2. Put things into a timeline. Where do you have dependencies? Eg. before the registration can open, you need to take decisions on reimbursement. Do everything without dependencies as early as possible – the closer you come to the conference, the crazier things will get.
3. When chosing a venue, consider implications: How easy is it to get accommodation close by? Are there workshop rooms? A secretariat? A press room? Lots of time was lost this week because some hotels were 40km from the conference venue – without any public transport link.
4. Set up the conference secretariat first. This allows people to take care of their emergencies. Don’t forget internet, printer, copying machine, a spare computer, extension cables and possibly a landline. While you’re at it: Use it as your internal communications hub and post all schedules, phone numbers, roles and announcements on the wall.
5. Allow participants to connect. At the beginning of a conference, people are usually slightly tired and confused. Give them time (and occasion) to understand who else is there, allow them to connect directly, and leave room in the program for this. Rather cut speeches than breaks.
6. Spread information widely. Not everyone will be in the room when you make an announcement. Put all important information on walls in the conference foyer. Brief your staff thoroughly, so that they can provide information if needed.
7. Take care of personal needs. Make sure you sleep enough. Encourage staff to take breaks. Provide for water and snacks in the conference secretariat. Have someone (and a car) available to cover unexpected needs. Distribute praise and a smile to other people working hard to make this conference a success.

We had a good conference this week, but it could have been better. I can feel the itch to get involved next time.

I’m getting increasingly annoyed when people tell me something is important. In the end and if I’m not mistaken – importance is determined subjectively, not objectively, isn’t it? I’m glad to agree with you about the importance of your concern, but then please share your reasoning. Tell me why something is important, and why I should care. And while you’re at it: Please be able to back your claims up. If you do so, I’ll listen attentively, I’ll try to follow your reasoning, and if I do, I might agree and take action. Not just because you tell me something is important.

Unfortunately, political appeals and messages seem to be doing just that. The result of this week’s conference?

• 
Considering the exceptional importance …
• Considering also the importance …
• Noting that xxx have an historic opportunity …

The message continues claiming that “there is an urgent need” to do something. Why? By whom?

What if we banned the words “important”, “historic”, “unique” and “urgent” from our vocabulary? We might actually be more successful in communicating the importance of our aims.

And while we’re at it – we might want to rethink the effectiveness of these messages: Just because a group of people agrees that someone (else) should do something specific, it ain’t gonna happen. Sometimes good old campaign strategy goes a long way: Understanding the issue, analysing the power balance, identifying allies and obstacles, defining a critical path of change, and finally making the right demand to the right person at the right moment.

Stuff of note:

• There is one place for online training material across international organizations: Open Training Platform
• Tradenet connects traders in African markets via text messages: Tradenet.biz
• Digital storytelling using audio and video is popular in areas with low connectivity: GINKS
• Euforic demonstrates how to aggregate and mashup on European Development Cooperation: Euforic
• Personal research portals will change the way science is conducted: ICTlogy

What I’ve learned:

• Measuring the impact of this still like poking in the dark.
• User-generated content in this context often means helping non-IT staff to take charge of their websites.
• The excitement comes down to five main tools (but sometimes it’s better not to use their names):

• Dated news entries (Blogs)
• Collective document development (Wikis)
• Collaborative filtering and categorization (Tags)
• Separating websites and content (RSS Feeds)
• Combining information from different places to create something new (Mash-ups)

I’m in Rome at the moment, at a large conference on Web 2.0 for Development, and I wonder whether anyone is having similar discussions in the environmental field. There’s a lot of excitement in the room, people speaking of the joy of exploring, of sharing – but also an awareness of the challenges: This is not a discussion about new tools, it has to be a discussion about communication and learning within and amongst organizations, and we need to foster openness, and participation and trust.

The buzzword of the morning was ‘aggregation’: Blog tools are great to collate the history of an organization and its activities, wikis can help to make implicit knowledge explicit, and all other media can supplement the information flow (links, pictures, video, audio, slides). Some of the beauty is in finding intelligent ways of presenting the wealth of information, and they can be software driven. Ismael Peña-López has a summary of the presentations.

Participatory web environments are far from new: Newsgroups and list serves have existed since the beginning of the web. New tools make it easier for people to direct their own flow of information, and make sharing and searching easier. I believe such a ‘participatory web’ needs three things to function:

1. An issue (what unites us?)
2. A target audience (who do we want to collaborate with?)
3. A constant feed of information (what can we learn together?)

Managing this communication centrally is very difficult and time consuming. Yet, it always needs contributors, and guardians. There is a trade-off between quality control and community driven processes.

There’s no shortage of information in the environmental community, but I sometimes feel that we’re not doing too well in using it. IUCN’s experts and scientists remain in their own corners. But knowledge is created through exchange and adaptation. How can we encourage this communication? How can we convince people of the benefits of contributing their information? How can we ensure quality in community driven processes?

No of people: any
Time needed: none
Objective: Break into groups without losing time

Preparation:
Assign a number or letter to each participant at registration (eg. on their name badges)

The task:
As people to find their groups according to their assigned number / letter.