“Experimentation is our get-out-of-jail-free card.” – 2011 Virtual Pioneers

There are professionals who have been practicing technology and engagement for years. I am in awe of many of those pioneers in the technology and meeting professional industries. They have been experimenting and learning the best practices of what works and what doesn’t work.

The Green Meetings Industry Council’s 2011 conference is one of the early conferences that I attended that explored what was possible. Elizabeth Valestuk Henerson and Mitchell Beer worked with an extensive team to create a fully gamified conference that was half face-to-face and half virtual. Click to download the free Case Study.

During the planning process, then at the conference itself, organizers adopted a motto, first stated by Samuel J. Smith, co-chair of Event Camp Twin Cities 2010:

“Experimentation is our get-out-of-jail-free card. If we weren’t having tech hiccups, we wouldn’t be innovating.”
-Samuel J. Smith

The entire conference was gamified, dividing attendees into teams and competing to create a case study using knowledge gained at the conference. Every team was assigned an iPad, which at the time was in its first generation. Every session was live-streamed and used Twitter to allow
attendees from around the world to attend and create new communication channels that the conference designers never anticipated.

One was that Samuel J. Smith (remember the quote above) was attending virtually from his home in Minnesota. Our team tweeted that we wanted more team members. Sam replied that he’d like to join and he immediately became a member of our team. I helped Sam engage in our team by setting up a computer on Skype and playing it through a set of speakers so everyone could hear Sam. We used Google Docs and Sam contributed significantly as we were simultaneously editing. Sam and I even recorded an interview on Skype and the organizers asked me to play it at the morning general session. Sam said it was one of his most engaging virtual conferences to date.

This is a conference that nine years after I attended it, I’m still talking about it. People remember exciting meetings.

Want to learn more?
Click to register for the Engaging Virtual Meetings Conference, every year in October.

http://engagingvirtualmeetings.com/conference

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