Conferences

On the new Green Chameleon, Patrick Lambe bags conferences and Vivian Kaye expresses her own doubts.

As a sometime organiser of the NSW KM Forum, I constantly struggle with how to make these sessions more participative vs. getting enough people through the door to make it worthwhile.

We have had some big-name speakers in the last few months and they tend to draw the crowds. However I have a problem with just getting in big names & letting them speak. It's not that they don't have anything to say (they do) or that attendees don't learn anything (they do - or so they tell me) but it takes attention away from the abilities & experiences of the practitioners in the room. It's a "broadcast" model of learning rather than a peer-to-peer one (think CNN vs. Bitorrent).

So how do we generate interest as well as increase participation? One option is the "guest facilitator" idea. David Rymer did this well at the Feb session. And our next session (this Thursday) is both facilitation-based & also introduces something else I'm keen on this year - liaising with other groups. The cool thing about KM is that it overlaps with some many other disciplines - it's at these fault lines that you tend to get the exciting possibilities. So this session is a joint event with ISPI.