by Barbara Palmer
A growing number of big-tent, big-idea conferences are aiming to do exactly that.
It was at a conference in New York City last fall where I first heard a blunt, not-so-nice term used to describe our collective condition: WorldSuck. Coined to describe the bundle of problems confronting the human race, it refers to challenges such as climate change, hunger, lack of clean drinking water, illiteracy, war, poverty, economic instability, gender discrimination, and HIV/AIDS.WorldSuck came up at the 2010 Open Video Conference, held at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, during a talk by Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University who studies how media shapes culture and social change. As one antidote to WorldSuck, Wesch presented the work of Shawn Ahmed, who dropped out of a graduate program in sociology to travel to Bangladesh, where he wanted to make an immediate difference in the lives of the poor. Through videos he posts on YouTube, writings and links on his own website (www.uncultured.com), and updates to Twitter, where he has 250,000 followers, Ahmed is raising money to fund education, water, health, and other humanitarian projects.
Ahmed’s work is interesting in it own right, but combined with other presentations at Open Video – including video projects that support grassroots development in India and document human-rights abuses in the far corners of the world – it illustrates a larger conference trend. Meetings have always been a place where individuals come together to talk about problems and solutions. But in recent years, there has been an explosion of conferences that pitch a very large tent and use collaborative problem-solving approaches to address global challenges. In a very real sense, they’re trying to save the world.
These big-tent, big-idea meetings are found all over the cultural and political landscape. President Bill Clinton founded the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005 to bring world leaders together into working groups to address specific challenges, such as strengthening world markets and increasing access to technology. Last September, publisher Tina Brown’s Daily Beast website convened a “Reboot America” summit in New Orleans that focused on cutting through the economic gloom and getting America back to work; presenters included former Afghanistan forces commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal and filmmaker Spike Lee. This March, the second annual “Women in the World: Stories and Solutions” summit – launched last year by Brown in partnership with a United Nations foundation – will convene an international forum in New York City, seeking ways to protect the world’s women and girls from sex trafficking and empower them economically.
And then there’s PopTech. Founded 15 years ago as the Camden Technology Conference, in Camden, Maine, the event brings 600 to 650 diverse thinkers and leaders together every year – “everyone from polar explorers to poets,” according to executive director Andrew Zolli – with one shared goal: to accelerate the positive impact of world-changing people, projects, and ideas. “People like Andrew Zolli know that movements can be spawned around the social interactions that are generated at conferences,” said Jason Severs, principal designer at Frog Design, which has done work for PopTech.
On the surface, these meetings may seem as different as night and day, but they have a lot in common. As they fill their stages with the world’s leading thinkers, they deliberately court diversity. Their organizers use digital tools, including video, webcasting, and blogging, to make meeting content accessible to a very broad audience and to create networks that are active year-round. And the organizers are committed not just to creating successful events but also to effecting measurable change.
‘Davos Meets Main Street’
When Maria Shriver, wife of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, took over the Women’s Conference, the two-decades-old meeting hosted by the Golden State’s governor and first lady had already grown beyond its origin as a half-day networking event for women interested in small-business loans, and had become a day-long forum at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center.
But Shriver – a member of the Kennedy family political dynasty and a former correspondent for NBC News – wanted to do more. Her vision, said Matthew DiGirolamo, a communications strategist for the Women’s Conference, was not just to help women make business connections, but to use the conference to empower women to be “architects of change.” Shriver’s father, Sargent Shriver, was the founder and first director of the Peace Corps, and his daughter has imbued the conference with a similar spirit of activism. “She didn’t want it to be just an event,” DiGirolamo said, “but rather a tent-raising for a movement.”
Shriver’s clout and personal network made it possible for her to attract big names to the Women’s Conference right from the start. Oprah Winfrey made an appearance at Shriver’s first conference, in 2003, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama made his first-ever appearance at any women’s conference three years later. In the last seven years, the conference has more than tripled in size. The 150 speakers for this year’s meeting – held on Oct. 24-26 – were drawn from the very top of their respective fields, and included First Lady Michelle Obama, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Deepak Chopra, Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, singer and songwriter Mary J. Blige, actress Goldie Hawn, poet Mary Oliver, Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight, and dozens more celebrities, pundits, and superstars.
Following the example set by Shriver, who this year spoke openly about the pain of giving up her public career when her husband became governor, most Women’s Conference speakers – no matter how glittery their rank – drop their “stump speeches” and speak from the heart, DiGirolamo said. “We want to make it real and make it emotional,” he said, “and create a safe space for women to be candid.” Which sounds unlikely, given that attendees were literally packed to the ceiling in Long Beach’s 46,000-square-foot Arena. But when playwright Eve Ensler debuted an emotionally devastating new poem, “The Gift of Cancer,” which linked her recent battle with ovarian cancer with crimes against women in the Congo and her own experience with rape, the atmosphere in the huge venue felt completely still.
The intent of the conference isn’t to convince attendees to follow a certain agenda, DiGirolamo said, but to give women access to thought leaders with whom they otherwise wouldn’t come into contact. There are any number of other big-idea gatherings where the upper tier is invited to come talk amongst themselves – the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for example, or the ultra-exclusive Renaissance Weekends – but the Women’s Conference is deliberately accessible. It’s open to the general public, and costs are kept low, with tickets ranging from $135 to $225 for “the Main Event,” the conference day. “We call it ‘Davos meets Main Street,’” DiGirolamo said.
But even in a venue that can accommodate thousands, demand still outstrips supply. Tickets to this year’s Main Event sold out in less than an hour. So the Women’s Conference makes its satellite feed available to organizations around the country, allowing them to create their own self-organized, live viewing events. The organization provides supporting materials – a kind of “conference-in-a-box,” DiGirolamo said. This year, for the first time, the conference included an interactive broadcast link with an audience gathered at New York University. There’s also a Women’s Conference website that has drawn a million users. Filled with content from the conference, and augmented with additional information and takeaways, it’s intended to be a daily destination, DiGirolamo said, “an event that happens every day.”
Creative Focus
While the Women’s Conference offered attendees a smorgasbord of possibilities for creating change, the seventh annual Creativity World Forum, held at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City on Nov. 15-17, took a focused look at the relationship between creativity and business, education, technology, and art. “Oklahoma may not leap to mind when one thinks of creativity,” said Susan McCalmont, the vice-chair of Creative Oklahoma, a nonprofit organization founded in 2006 to promote innovation in the state. “Any place can be creative if you pay attention to it, and cultivate it. And creativity can be suppressed, in business and learning.”
Oklahoma is the only North American member of the Districts of Creativity (DC) Network, which has 14 members from regions on three continents. The DC Network organizes the Creativity World Forum, which pairs government leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, and academics from the network with outside experts to exchange ideas. With attendees from 38 countries, including South Africa, Korea, Singapore, Russia, and Uruguay, the audience represented “probably the largest international contingent in Oklahoma – ever,” McCalmont said.
At the conference, speakers including PopTech’s Zolli, author Dan Pink, and creativity guru Sir Ken Robinson, mixed with international and homegrown experts to discuss topics ranging from urban planning and architecture, to the future of museums, to innovations in agriculture, energy, and education. The Creativity World Forum provided a space for attendees to meet face-to-face, but international conversations about creativity had been going on for months in advance of the meeting. That approach represents a way of looking at conferences that goes beyond “I need to do the perfunctory annual meeting,” McCalmont said, and treats them more as a platform for themes and ideas that bring networks of people together around specific interests.
McCalmont describes the work of Creative Oklahoma as deliberately building just such a network to foster creativity and innovation. And even more connections are in store. During the Creativity World Forum, the launch of a National Creativity Network – linking state and regional creativity initiatives in Oklahoma with similar efforts in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Colorado, Massachusetts, and New York, with Sir Ken Robinson as the founding chair – was announced. “There’s been a lot of Skype happening lately,” McCalmont said.
She added: “Because the technology allows us to communicate in the in-between time, when we do meet physically, we get to the work quicker. But I don’t think anything ever replaces the physical gathering. We are human – we need that human connection.”
The New Networks
A combination of spaces that allow for both human and digital connections is typical of new conference communities. The most obvious example is TED and its companion website, www.TED.com, which makes TEDTalks available to a global audience. Other big-idea conferences are building similar networks. PopTech – which actually describes itself as a network rather than as an event – has built a website (www.pop tech.org) filled with video content from previous conferences, as well as blogs that follow PopTech meetings and initiatives.
Likewise, The Economist magazine created a website (http://ideas.econony.com) to accompany a new series of conferences it launched under the heading “The Ideas Economy.” Held in New York City and Berkeley, Calif., the conferences – which Frog Design’s Jason Severs, a consultant for the events, describes as “deep dives” into the area of ideas and innovation – “explore issues at the commanding heights of the global economy, as well as the root of human progress and human potential under the banner of The Economist.”
For example, the second conference in the series, Human Potential 2010, held Sept. 15-16 at Pier 60 overlooking the Hudson River in New York City, addressed the nature of the human capital that will be needed in the economy of the future. Human Potential 2010 asked the question “How do we educate billions of new people in the coming decades – and manage their successful entry into the global economy – in an age of high unemployment and aging demographics?” The conference brought together 90 speakers billed as “the smartest minds from government, academia, and business” to debate and collaborate on solutions. The speaker lineup lived up to the hype, with presenters including White House domestic-policy adviser Melody Barnes; Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Great Reset; Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus; and Shirley M. Tilghman, president of Princeton University.
Human Potential also wanted to find a way to tap into the creativity and ideas of the 200 attendees. Usually when attendees arrive at a conference, they’re greeted with an information packet that orients them to the exact schedule they’ll be following for the next few days. “You see people talking, you hear the ideas floating around,” Severs said, “but there’s generally not a means of capturing those ideas.” At Human Potential, organizers gave each attendee a deck of cards, dubbed “Playables,” designed to change the dynamics of social interactions and make it easier for people to talk to one another. Severs said: “We took that as an opportunity to say, ‘Oh, wait, there’s another experience that can happen over the course of the conference that you are in control of.’”
The five cards included “Dare Cards,” which prompted attendees to go up and talk to a favorite speaker or another attendee; “Buzzword Cards,” which asked attendees to collaboratively create new words; and “Book Jacket Cards,” which instructed participants to find others with whom to create a book cover based on ideas they heard at the conference. Organizers collected the results at the end of the first day and presented them at the conference, and also made them available on the Ideas Economy website, along with an analysis of the tool.
The cards were coded by job title, and while only about a third of attendees played the game, most of them were in leadership or creative positions. “Participation gave those attendees a different stake in the conference,” Severs said. “They created their own content out of their experience.” In general, he said, people are expecting more from their interactions at every conference they attend. “They want to walk away with some result.”
Beyond Talking Heads
And that brings us to another characteristic of the big-idea conference: a focus on tangible results. At the Clinton Global Initiative, each member creates a concrete plan to address a major global challenge. Since 2005, members have made more than 1,900 commitments in more than 170 countries; when fully funded and implemented, these programs will be valued at $63 billion.
Similarly, in the last seven years, the Women’s Conference has awarded $350,000 in scholarships to young women, given a quarter-million dollars to domestic-violence shelters, and awarded more than $1 million in grants through its Minerva Awards, a program created in 2004 to fund the work of women whose efforts are making the world a better place.
In Oklahoma, grants programs associated with Creative Oklahoma formally funds ideas and projects, but some achievements are the result of the combustive effect of two or more minds meeting. The creation of the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma, for example, was born out of discussions between Creative Oklahoma board members Scott Booker, manager of the Oklahoma City-based band The Flaming Lips, Central Oklahoma’s president, and a board adviser from England who was familiar with the Academy of Contemporary Music in Liverpool.
The partnership between the Thomas Tallis School, outside London, and Howe High School, in rural eastern Oklahoma, had a similarly organic beginning. Students at the two schools communicated via Skype, and then met at the Creativity World Forum, where they jointly participated in an experimental “pop-up” school, with content taught by video and podcast. Howe is “literally in the middle of nowhere,” a Tallis teacher wrote on the school’s blog. “Apart from the school building, the only other significant architectural features in Howe are the convenience store and the lumberyard.” In spite of its isolation – or, more likely, because of it – the Oklahoma high school is leading learning experiments across the United States using videoconferencing. The British teacher wrote: “Howe High School teacher Tammy Sparks proved to be an inspirational colleague.”
Such uses of technology are reinventing education, according to McCalmont, who noted that, in 2009, Creative Oklahoma hosted a one-day international symposium for 500 attendees called “The New Renaissance,” which looked at creativity and the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology. “Coming out of this is an understanding that people need to connect, and they need to connect physically,” McCalmont said. “It is very important for people to be inspired by one another.”
> Barbara Palmer is a senior editor of Convene
Compound Interest
The World Business Forum held its seventh annual gathering of international business leaders in New York City this past October, with an agenda broadly focused on innovation and trends in global business – as well as on leadership. For two days, rock stars in the worlds of business and politics took the stage at Radio City Music Hall, including Jack Welch, the former chairman and CEO of General Electric; former Vice President Al Gore; Jim Collins, author of Built to Last and Good to Great; film writer, producer, and director James Cameron; David Gergen, an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton; and dozens more.
With more than 4,500 attendees in 2010, the World Business Forum is the single largest gathering of senior executives in the nation. But the emphasis is on opening up the event to even more people and fostering a sense of community around the conference, according to Santiago Muro, senior vice president of sales and operations for HSM USA, which organizes the World Business Forum. Added Sebastian Mackinlay, HSM USA’s senior vice president of marketing and sales: “We know that thousands of executives would love to be able to get access to the conference. But they don’t all have the money or time to travel.”
For the first time this year, HSM webcast the event. Approximately 5,000 people purchased online passes – a number that the company expects will double or triple next year. And many thousands more people came into contact with the World Business Forum through social media. For the second year, HSM invited top business bloggers to be part of a “Blogger Hub” at the conference. Sixty showed up, including writers from mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, and online superstars like lifestyle-industry entrepreneur Jonathan Fields. The 60 bloggers, many of them with thousands of followers, had a compounding effect on the spread of the ideas expressed at the conference, said George Levy, HSM Americas’ e-business director. Their tweets, combined with those of conference attendees, put the 2010 World Business Forum in the top 10 trending topics worldwide on Twitter at some points during the conference.
But the best part was that the bloggers brought their own intellectual capital to the conference. Through their blog posts, Levy said, they reflected the content through “60 different prisms.”
On the Web
- Catch featured videos from PopTech at www.poptech.org/popcasts. The website also has information about the PopTech “accelerator” programs, including PopTech Labs, a collaborative problem-solving initiative.
- Watch videos from the Women’s Conference at www.womensconference.org.
- Video and transcripts from Clinton Global Initiative meetings are available at www.clintonglobalinitiative.org.
- Information about Creative Oklahoma and the Creativity World Forum is available at http://stateofcreativity.com.
- Links to the bloggers featured at the World Business Forum can be found at http://bit.ly/9Lqxwj.
- Find information about The Economist’s “Ideas Economy” series, including a blog and videos about the collaborative conference experience, at http://ideas.economist.com.
View article at Professional Convention Management Association’s site
