Nancy White on conference design

I see Nancy White has also responded to Clay Shirky's post on the backchannel at conferences. Among other useful ideas, she suggests that pre and post conference online work ("for agenda creation and relationship creation/deepening and post for reflection") can help a lot to make a conference more participatory. She also points to Open Space, an approach to organising meetings where there is no pre-formed agenda but participants simply post topics they are willing to facilitate a discussion about on an Agenda Wall (together with a time and venue) and report-backs from discussions are posted on a News Wall. If like me you get frustrated by all the stuff on the Open Space site about its benefits and can't find the bottom-line about how it works - try the two page primer.