Lynn Anderson

Hi don,

I frequently lurk in conferences, too.

Thank you for the document, it is a great resource. I thought you might also be interested in this link: 2010 Top Tools: Best in Breed List. The site lists some of the best learning and performance technologies. Many of these are freely available or very inexpensive.

Lynn

Hi Sue,

Thanks for providing this information on what is involved in the design of your conferences ( and thanks for ordering the book). I commend you for taking the time to summarize weekly conversations. In doing the interviews with conference organizers, I only came across one other who took the time to do that. She also said that her efforts were highly valued by the conference participants.

Hi Susan,

To the best of my knowledge, you can’t integrate a twitter feed into Elluminate. However, I have heard of many instances where a “back-channel” was set-up (by participants or conference organizers) so that individuals could interact there during live sessions. Back-channel conversations took place in Twitter and/or Facebook. These conversations were tagged, aggregated, and available from a central conference website. 

I've also heard of simultaneous back channel converations going on in Skype and wikis being opened on the fly during live sessions in order for participants to collaborate on presentation related content. The wiki was then linked to the conference website.

Hope this helps.

Hi Sylvia,
I'd like to comment on your first point - "Seeing who will be attending and having ways to connect ahead of the event". Almost all of the conference organizers that I interviewed emphasized the importance of organizing a pre-conference event and/or icebreaker activities prior to the first formal sessions. They provided many reasons:

• Events and activities taking place prior to the conference provided an opportunity for participants to become comfortable with the platform and complete any pre-configuration necessary (plug-ins, audio set-up, avatar creation, etc.)
• Pre-conference events promoted the actual conference and increased participant numbers.
• Pre-conference events provided an opportunity for participatns to familiarize themselves with the content.
  
• Pre-conference events and icebreaker activites ensured that the online delegates were ready to actively participate on the first day of formal events.
• Organizers felt that by making participants comfortable with the platform and each other, they increased the interaction that took place early on in the conference.

I should note that some preconference events were in the form of workshops, etc., that took place weeks ahead of the conference. While other events were more social in nature (icebreaker activities, introductions, parties in SecondLife, etc.) and took place immediately before the conference.

Hi Tony,

Thanks for your response. I agree that viewing a recording of a live meeting is much less intense and appealing for most of us. That said, the numbers of people that view the recordings far outweigh the number of attendees at the live event. It is of course, more convenient.

As far as attendance in the live meeting, I have often found that the amount of interaction within the event itself does not seem to correlate with attendance numbers. It seems more related to the topic, and the efforts of the presenter and the moderator to encourage interaction.