I’ve been thinking about how community building and events fit together a lot lately, and I wanted to share some suggestions for both attendees and organizers.

Evening Activities

As an organizer, always try to make sure that we have some fun and interesting evening activities for attendees. Just in the past year at events, I’ve toured the Guinness Storehouse and attended a football game (that’s soccer for the Americans) in Dublin, gone on a river dinner cruise in Boston, had a casino night at a resort in Oregon and attended more parties than I can count at SXSW. Here are a few tips for event organizers to maximize community building at evening activities:

• Have food and drinks (free if possible). This encourages people to actually attend rather than skipping out to have dinner in small groups.
• Organize group transportation. This removes one more barrier to attend and encourages people to continue talking to people during the trip. I’ve seen this work as a group walking a few blocks to the event, or in waves of buses.
• Encourage mingling. You want to encourage people to move around and not sit in the same place with the same few people all evening. Some standing tables, activities (like casino nights) that encourage people to move around and having multiple rooms with different things to see and do can all encourage people to talk to more people.
• If budgets are tight, this isn’t the place the skimp. In most cases, you can find a company to sponsor the evening activities if you don’t have enough money in the regular event budget.

For attendees, you should resist the urge to skip the evening activities and go back to the hotel to do “real work.” Remember that meeting people is a goal of your event, and may be even more important than attending sessions; don’t short change yourself by going to the conference and then spending all of your time doing work that you could have done at home. Focus on the conference; you can always do your work on the plane. Here are few tips to help you make the most out of the evening activities as an attendee:

• Resist the urge to sit with people you already know well, or sit with one friend and invite a few people that you don’t know very well to join your table.
• Move around and talk to a few people that you don’t already know.
• If there aren’t any evening activities, make your own. Find something fun to do, and invite a group of people to join you.

Play Games

I’m not talking about those dorky team-building games. Organizers should resist the urge to attempt to force people to play stupid games under the guise of meeting new people. I’m talking about fun games, like Mafia and Werewolf, that can be played by large groups where attendees can meet new people while having a great time. Werewolf is a particularly good game for community building because it gives people something to do and something to talk about while putting everyone on the same level: celebrities, students and executives all play as equals. People who doesn’t know many attendees can play werewolf and meet some new people, and for others, it helps get them out of their little club of friends to meet someone new. I like to make additional decks of Werewolf cards to hand out on the first night to encourage people to play other ad hoc games of Werewolf on future evenings. It’s also a great activity for after some of the more official evening activities.

The beauty of these kinds of games is that anyone can organize a game, since they don’t really require any special equipment and can be easily played with scraps of paper in lieu of printed cards. You don’t need to be a conference organizer, and I encourage conference attendees to organize evening games. If you aren’t a fan of Werewolf, there are plenty of other, similar games.

Shared Spaces and Hacker Lounges

When I organize events, I try to make sure that we have some kind of shared space (or hacker lounge for the tech events) where people can hang out together to talk or collaborate on some projects. If there are a lot of people traveling to the event and staying in a hotel, I try to put this lounge in the hotel and keep it open 24 hours, which encourages late night games and people getting together to be social or work together. All you really need is a room and few tables and chairs at the minimum, but to really encourage people to use it, you can add some free snacks, ping pong tables, video games or other social activities. This is a great place for people to get together for late night games; I’ve played many Werewolf games until the wee hours of the morning in these lounges. For single day events or local conferences, a big room with tables and power strips that is dedicated to attendees (no sessions) can fill this need.

If the organizer hasn’t provided some kind of shared space, attendees should make one. Declare one of the hotel lounge areas, lobby or bar as the informal lounge, and encourage people to meet you there.

Interested in learning more about the intersection of real-world and virtual collaboration? Come to our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on December 9.

What are your favorite tips for encouraging community building at events?

Photo by Reggie Suplido used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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Conferences often come with very long days that start with breakfast and move on to sessions, lunches, more sessions and then evening events and after-parties; all of which can leave you feeling exhausted and overworked, if you aren’t careful. Before you start thinking about how to approach the event, you need to think about your goals. Are you there to learn, to network, for press coverage or some other purpose? Most of us probably have overlapping goals for any event, but it really can help to understand what you want to get out of the event.

I’m here at OSCON partly to blog about some of the interesting sessions talking about the community that I manage and to network with other people in the industry. As a result, I needed to attend a few sessions and spend time talking to people, while still finding time to keep up with work and blog about the event. The trade-off is that I spent most of the breaks talking to people while doing my work during times when there weren’t any sessions that I needed to attend.

The key to attending events and getting the most out of them is to stay focused on what is important: Your goals and the purpose for attending in the first place. It can be easy to spend the whole time multitasking — trying to attend sessions and work simultaneously — while not managing to do well at either task. When I attend sessions, I try to ignore or even shut off my email and the social networking streams on my laptop, while leaving a note-taking window open so that I can jot down any key points from the presentation. Admittedly, I’m not perfect, and I find myself checking or responding to email sometimes, but whenever I do that, I become much less engaged in the presentation. On the other hand, I skip some sessions entirely and use that time to catch up on work or blogging. This helps me make sure that I carve out enough time for event activities and my regular work while accomplishing both of them relatively efficiently.

One common mistake I see is when people try to do all of their regular work and attend the conference at the same time. Usually this means neglecting the conference or falling short on sleep. I’ve seen colleagues and friends who fly to a conference in another city and then spend most of their time sitting in on conference calls. If you are going to be spending all of your time attending your regular meetings and doing your regular work you might as well save the company some money and stay home to work. When I attend a conference, I cancel every meeting that I don’t absolutely have to attend and limit the number of non-event meetings. This gives me a break from the regular routine and lets me focus more on the conference. I also try not to work late into the night so that I can get a reasonable amount of sleep to avoid being a zombie during the day. So far this week, I’ve been pretty good, but I’ll admit to pulling a couple of late nights despite my best efforts to get my work done during the day.

What are your favorite tips for staying productive while still getting most out of your conference?

Photo by Flickr user wesleynitsckie used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Generic 2.0 license.

A great conference leaves you feeling empowered, inspired and ready to take on whatever comes your way. And then you arrive home feeling overwhelmed as you unpack, do laundry, open snail mail and handle all the mundane stuff that needs doing. Not only that, but also you have so much information that you hardly know where to begin to put it to use.

Profit from a Conference in Five Easy Steps

Recovered? Rested? Don’t proceed until you are. For a day or two, focus on recovering and getting through the mundane stuff. You have notes, business cards, programs and handouts to help you remember what you need to know. Then start making your conference pay off with these five steps.

1. Review your content. This includes notes, business cards, handouts, people to follow up with and anything else that came back with you. Don’t use this time to read it all. Instead, sort the content into three piles:
   • Now: The information most important to you, and items with deadlines.
   • Next: The things to look after you finish working through the “Now” pile.
   • Never: Useless stuff you received and items with the least value. Be ruthless: Toss them in the trash. Let them go, otherwise you risk doing nothing with any of the things you brought home. Tip: Next time you go to a conference, do a review to toss the bad stuff before you leave, as it will leave less to pack and less to contend with when you get home.
2. Act on the quick “Now” items. Read the notes, enter business cards into your address book, drop a quick note to contacts, link up with contacts in social networks and make a list of action items that will take more time.
3. Schedule “Now” items that take more time. If you want to, say, write an article based in information received or study notes in depth, put them on your tasks list with due dates to ensure they get done.
4. Check for information posted online. You may skip this if you have all you need. Sometimes you find a gap in the information you have or wish you had notes from a session you couldn’t attend. Find out if the sessions were recorded or the speaker’s slides have been posted online, and see if the conference had a Twitter hashtag or web site where everyone shared notes.
5. Complete your tasks. Make sure to follow up on the items scheduled in step 3.

Go Deeper With Your Conference Knowledge

Everyone absorbs and uses information differently. Here are things you can do to make the most of your conference content. Just watch out that you don’t get overwhelmed;  it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to contact too many people, select too much to study or write too many articles.

• Follow up with people. Did you make any promises to contacts you made at the event? Do those first before pursuing the rest of your “Now” items. Only move onto the “Next” group after you have comfortably followed up and stayed in touch with the higher-priority contacts.
• Study the materials. Since you sorted out the more important content, study it. How you study depends on your learning style. Looking over it one time isn’t enough for most people to remember and apply the concept. As you learn the material, you’ll find opportunities to put it to work. After you feel you got what you needed from the material,  move on to the “Next” pile.
• Write blog posts or articles. For some, one of the best ways to learn the material and let it sink in is by writing an article or blog. Make a list of article ideas and then prioritize them. Write articles on the most important topics. Put away remaining ideas for safekeeping.

Next time you prepare for another conference or trade show, check out Judi’s “A Conference Survival Guide for the Web Worker.”

How do you make the most of a conference after returning home?

Photo by stock.xchng user Vicky 5.

For web workers, though, finding opportunities to continue our educations can be a little harder. Where some employees have access to educational materials on-site or may even be required to attend classes at work, we’re a little more on our own. That doesn’t mean we’re out of luck, though.

Online Classes

If we work online, why can’t we study online? A number of organizations are offering online classes these days, from colleges to professional organizations, as well as thousands of free options. The real question is if you need a certificate or another method of proving that you actually attended the class. If you’re learning for the sake of knowledge, you can download lectures from iTunes or even find a curriculum you can follow on your own at Wikiversity.

If, however, you need that piece of paper, you will likely need to enroll in a course through an educational institution or professional organization. Depending on your profession, you may find that a professional organization already has a continuing education program in place; all you have to do is take the courses listed. Otherwise, you may find that you need to determine which classes are the most useful for you.

Conferences and Seminars

If you’re willing to devote a few days to attending a conference on the topic you’re interested in, it can get you up to speed on a topic — fast . Depending on where you’re living, you may be able to find a relevant conference nearby. There are also a growing number of conferences and seminars that you can attend virtually. In some cases, you can list these sorts of educational opportunities on your resume, but you can also discuss them in the context of a new project or job to win over a prospect.

Balancing Continuing Education

Even if you don’t have a set number of continuing education hours you must complete every few years, it’s often worthwhile to set your own goals for continuing to learn about your area of expertise. Not only will it make you a more valuable candidate for a project, but it can also make your own work easier to complete.

One of the biggest factors keeping web workers from furthering their education is the fact that classes and conferences have price tags. The fact of the matter is, though, that the cost may not be exactly what you expect. In many countries, you can deduct continuing education expenses on your taxes as long as they relate to your profession. You may also qualify for discounts or scholarships, depending on the professional organizations you belong to.

How are you continuing your education?

Image by Flickr user Avolore

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One of the things I do is translation and, like all of the translators I know, I have a profile on ProZ.com. This year is the site’s 10th anniversary and, to celebrate, it held its first virtual conference on International Translation Day. It was free, and I signed up, even though I knew I wouldn’t get any free pens out of it.

The exhibitors were major translation agencies and computer assisted translation (CAT) tool companies, so it was worth my time to check them all out. There were several ways to get to the “booths.” Each had an interactive information area with links to text and video you could view on the spot, or you could save documents to your “briefcase” to take with you. There were reps available in every booth for live chat, and you could also chat with other visitors to the booth.

An exhibitor booth

There was a “conference hall” with live webcasts that could also be viewed later, on useful topics like how to negotiate rates. There were scheduled networking events, essentially a chat room, for specific groups (translators of certain languages, for example). It was possible to exchange “business cards” with other attendees (the app used the data you registered with).

The platform Proz used, provided by Unisfair, was pretty user friendly, and my overall experience was a positive one, although the interface was kind of cheesy. This particular platform may be too pricey for individuals, but there are probably ways to duplicate the overall effect using other apps if you want to get creative and hold a gathering of your own.

It seems like the virtual event concept is still pretty new and that there’s room for improvement. I’d like to see an app that does all the same things but in a much less literal way: Simplified, lean and mean, with less Flash.

Proz has decided to leave the conference up until next September if you’re interested in checking it out.

If you’ve attended a virtual conference, I’d like to hear your take on it.

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If you made the most of your time at the conference, you made a lot of new contacts and expanded on old ones. When you get home, it is time to start carrying those relationships into the future. And when an event is fresh in your mind is also when you need to evaluate your experience to decide what worked and what didn’t about it.

There are four main follow-up tasks to complete after a conference to ensure that the benefits of the conference continue long after the event is done.

Keep your promises. The first thing to do when you get home from an event is to keep any promises that you made while you were there. Did you promise to email someone, send someone something, or put information up on your web site? Get that done as soon as possible. Thanks to your phone or a laptop and on-the-go wireless, you may even be able to get some of these tasks done before you get home. Keeping your promises, and in a timely manner, will mark you as reliable and trustworthy, and the contact will bring you to forefront of people’s minds again.

The biggest challenge in keeping promises may be in remembering what promises you made during the chaos of an event. A good tactic is to have a dedicated place to record promises as soon as you make them. It can be a page in your Moleskine, or a notes file on your phone, but the important thing is that you should automatically make a note whenever you make a promise.

Follow up with contacts. This activity can take many forms depending on the interaction you had and your work. It can mean sending emails to say how much you enjoyed a conversation, or calling someone to discuss potential business. You might want to follow people on places like Twitter and Facebook to keep in contact with them regularly. The key is to make contact and extend the relationship past the event itself.

Enter contacts in your manager. It’s all too easy to put off the tedious task of entering business cards in your contact manager, especially if you don’t have a card scanner. But it’s best to do it before you forget who the people in that stack are. Use the notes field to help you remember key points from your contact that might be useful in doing business (or just reminding you who the person is) later. Use the date field to record when the information you entered was current. It only takes a moment to enter that date but the rare times you need it, you will be glad you did.

Review the event. Lastly, you need to report to yourself about the event. While it is fresh in your mind, consider what worked well and what didn’t. Think about what you’d do differently if you attended again. Should you attend more seminars? Did you need more time to visit vendors than you anticipated? Would you like to pre-plan more evening events? Make a few notes for yourself that you can refer to when planning to attend again.

What do you do (besides unpack) when you get home from a conference?

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Know Why You Are Attending

First up in your strategic planning is to decide exactly why you are going to attend the event. You need to set goals about what you would like to accomplish at the conference. Depending on the event, there are many possible goals you could have, including:

• Networking. Trade shows are great places to cement current contacts and make new ones. Call it “seeing friends” or call it networking, but spending time with people at trade shows can be very productive.
• Research. Before making a purchase or starting a new project, there may be information you need to collect.
• Purchase. Vendor halls at trade shows are filled with companies offering products and services, often at special discounts.
• Education. Most trade shows have specialized education programs for attendees that can be hard to duplicate through other sources.

You almost certainly will have more than one goal for your trip, so then you will need to take a second step. Examine your goals and establish priorities by deciding their order of importance. This is necessary because most conferences and trade shows are very busy and there are too many activities to be able to see and do everything.

Know Who & What Will Be There

The next step is to find out who’s attending and also find out about the exhibitors and the education programs. Poll your contacts on your social networks, email key business contacts, and go over the conference program thoroughly. Make notes for yourself about all the people, vendors and education programs that fit appropriately with your goals. You should finish with at least a list of appointments to make, booths to visit, and sessions to attend.

Make Your Plan

The final step is to assemble your plan. For this you’ll need your calendar. Start by blocking out the times for any scheduled events such as classes or keynotes that fit your goals. Then everything else can be worked around those inflexible items.

Next, if one of your goals is to network, don’t leave it to chance that you will see people important to you. Work your way through your list of contacts that you would like to see, using phone or email to arrange a meeting if possible.

If you need to spend time in a vendor hall researching or making a purchase, try to schedule appointments so that your time isn’t too fragmented. Schedule yourself a nice block for research or shopping. And try not to over-schedule. Leave yourself a little open time to be spontaneous for something like a last-minute dinner with a new contact.

Making reservations is just half the planning for a smart trade show attendee. Taking time to plan and strategize before a trade show trip can help make the time and money spent on the trip worth your while.

What steps do you take to prepare for a trade show or conference?

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Previously on WebWorkerDaily, I talked about the differences in they way that the community conferences are organized and posted an interview with Audrey Eschright, a BarCamp and unconference organizer. This time I was interested in differences in content between traditional conferences and community-organized events.

Since anyone can propose a session at BarCamp, you tend to get more crazy ideas and niche sessions with great information that would never have an audience broad enough to justify a session at most traditional commercial conferences. You also get some terrible sessions and ideas that just don’t make much sense, but the beauty of BarCamp is that you can wander in and out of sessions pretty easily.

Some examples of interesting sessions at BarCampAustin included: How to start an online bacon business in a month, half-baked entrepreneurial theater (where people come up with crazy business ideas), air ships and more.

I wanted to get a second opinion on the content, so I asked Selena Deckelmann, an unconference organizer currently working on a community-organized, open-source event in Portland, about the future of community-organized events vs. more traditional conferences. Here’s her take on the differences:

“I think community-organized/grassroots events are the only way effective conferences focused on learning and getting work done will be organized in the future. I don’t think companies dedicated to conference management can keep up with and offer the technical depth and 1:1 networking opportunities that a focused, community-driven event can.

Photo by Kirrily Robert

The smaller, more focused and more local you can make events, the better educational, personal and professional development opportunities people get.

There’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to a 10k-person event. Sure, it’s exciting to be with that many people, and interesting to see what kinds of entertaining spectacles companies come up with to draw in a crowd in an expo. But, for me, I get way more out of a 1:1, a 10-15 person group discussion. If the goal is education and learning, you need smaller, focused groups.”

Many people underestimate the value of small group discussions as an opportunity to learn about new ideas. Being able to participate in a small group discussion where each person can ask more questions and interact on a personal basis, rather than the traditional presentation and panel model at most commercial conferences, can be a great learning experience.

What types of conferences do you prefer? What are your experiences with the content differences between traditional conferences and community-organized events?

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South by Southwest 2009

Here’s a guide to the SXSW 2009 Interactive panels that web workers worldwide should look out for.

Friday, March 13th

My Boss Doesn’t Get It: Championing Social Media to the Man — A major and ongoing challenge/opportunity for web workers is to prove-by-example the power of social media.

GameChangers – Improvisation for Business in the Networked World — This panel covers improving “teamwork, creativity, flexibility and problem-solving skills”: essential for every web worker!

Saturday, March 14th

Emerging From a Recession with Emerging Media Intact — While recessions cause a lot of widespread pain, they also pose great opportunities for emerging technologies, online businesses and business practices, and web-based workers.

Blog on Company Time and Get Promoted — Every web worker can learn how to better promote their company and engage relevant audiences –- whether it’s a Fortune 500 multinational or a startup of one -– and blogging is an essential part of the equation.

From Geek to Peak: Your First Year as a Freelance Geek — This session is geared toward developers making a go of it as freelance contractors, but the larger web working community can benefit from honing their freelancer skills.

Working Alone Sucks: Join the Coworking Revolution — Coworking is a hot topic in web working circles.

Sunday, March 15th

From Flickr and Beyond: Lessons in Community Management — Insight into growing, managing, and monitoring online communities. Panel members include representatives from Flickr, Current TV, YouTube, Etsy and MetaFilter.

What Do I Do With Myself, Now that the Economy Has Collapsed? — The ebb and flow of the tech economy – and specifically the current recession – brings an altered and fluid environment for web workers. Hearing from veterans who have been through past tech economy downturns and have come out the other side will surely be something that you will want to pay attention to.

Pitfalls and Opportunities: How to Fund a Startup — The current economy has made funding new ideas more difficult — at least in the traditional ways. Web workers and entrepreneurs looking to create the Next Big Thing will want to check out this panel for hints, tips and advice.

Monday, March 16th

The Invisible Web and Ubiquitous Computing — The cost of running a technology-based business keeps falling while the availability and speed of networked services keeps growing. All good things that affect the daily lives of web workers!

Beyond Aggregation: Finding the Web’s Best Content — Successful web workers access and analyze a torrent of content everyday and redistribute and repackage the most relevant bits. Finding out the latest in what’s going on with RSS and content aggregation should be a popular session, with representatives from ReadWriteWeb, louisgray.com, Techmeme, AideRSS, and Lijit in attendance.

Outsourcing 2.0: Is the World Flat or Not? — Web working increasingly means leveraging outsourced resources, so finding out the latest trends from industry experts from the likes of Monsoon Company, Startech Global and Flatsourcing.com will be very useful.

Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny — The choice of which CMS to use is a tricky one.This panel features a fun showdown, an “Iron Chef style competition” in which developers from various open-source content management systems will all build the same web site.

Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins — The web browser is where the web worker lives and breathes, so hearing from representatives of Mozilla, Microsoft, and Opera should be very exciting indeed. No Google though!

What panels and presentations are you most looking forward to from SXSW Interactive this year?

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Though I was only able to attend the opening sessions with around twenty participants, the initial session to shape the day’s agenda revealed some useful and interesting topic areas for freelancers and indie workers.

Participants collectively decided to divide the day into four one-hour sessions, each moderated by a volunteer and intended to draw out the room’s collective knowledge and experience in each area. This generally resulted in sprawling mind-maps, that helped both to drive and document the discussions…

Finance – everything from defining your market, creating statements-of-work, intellectual property, sales, rates and risk. Curiously, the moderator as a rule gives away 80% of his output, depending on the remainder for financial viability.

Confidence – finding your voice, self-esteem, understanding the relationship between permission and authority for freelancers as well as mentoring those less experienced, to deepen you own value.

Growth – moving from a ‘solo’ freelancing lifestyle business to a fulltime work pattern, perhaps with subcontractors, virtual assistants, accountants and book keeper, joining professional networks, being an active contributor in social networks such as LinkedIn as well as working in collectives with other freelancers.

Clients – getting more out of existing business contacts, developing long term relationships and using case studies to sell your skills.

Participants also collectively noted their recommendations for software and tools on a publicly accessible wiki, available here; though Web Worker Daily readers may be familiar with most of them, it’s worth seeing if there are any applications or methods that may have been previously overlooked.

Finally, participants collated their reflections on the day’s discussion, notably…

• Personal branding does matter.
• Set short, medium and long-term marketing goals.
• Don’t sell yourself cheap.
• Have jobs agreed in writing before you start.
• Don’t price per hour, price according to the value to the client.
• Look to work from coworking spaces.

All in all, a handful of people seemed to have crafted an interesting and useful series of discussions. Find out more at the official wiki.

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