Thoughts after 1 year of hybrid events
To really get what an Hybrid Events is all about i think the best way is to experience it under each angle first.
1) Remote Attendee
2) POD Attendee
3) F2F Main event attendee
Those are the audience of an hybrid event and those are the engagement and experience you need to learn in order to being able to address them. To do this i tried in the past year to take advantage of the eventcamp event. First by attending the BASEL POD during event camp twin cities 2010, then by remotely attend eventcamo twin cities 2011 and finally by attending f2f event camp europe this month. In this blog I will then try to outline what i think are pro & cons of each scenario and what i enjoyed in each of it.
1) Being a Remote attendee give extra value because of lower barrier of entrance (traveling,…). As a remote attendee i then found really valuable a professional and high quality live streaming of the event together with talk/slides and i have to say that SonicFoundry is a tremendous technology the just deliver it. Being able to engage is something good, for me this is especially good in the form of being able ti virtually rise my hand and make questions to the speakers. In my remote experience for #ECTC11 the twitter backchannel worked like a charm but that because on the other side of the line there was a dedicate person, aka the virtual emcee (gr8 job @EmilieBarta ), that was good enough to catch best questions and point them out at specific times to the speaker. Being a remote attendee means i don’t have the chance to know better the speaker face to face and therefore the interviews done for us between session were just what i needed. For the rest i found hard to engage in games, team work or other too collaborative session or task. I was also missing some kind of chat and list of all the remote attendee so i could engage and share with them as i felt being part of something together with them, a group. One important thing to keep in mind is not to overwhelm us remote attendees with too much tools, sites and systems to use as we already have to keep attention on the live stream and therefore we are already focused on something on our computer.
2) A POD is an event itself, so if remote attending is more like watching an interactive DVD alone at homes, pods is more like going to the cinema with friends, of course we all see the same movie, but we share popcorn and chats during it. I therefore envision two ways of making use of PODS, one where a group of people gather together to remote attend the main event with the added value to locally network with other people f2f, get to know each other before the streaming event kick off and finding moments to discuss about it during and afterward, i would call this “Passive PODS”. The other way instead have to deals with the POD being active in making the event itself. This to be possible have to be well planned in the root of the event for example by having e talk or session done at each PODS. Active Pods create more value but are harder to plan and manage. Pods need to know eachother and feel part of that group, sharing among them. This is the toughest part of the job. So Pods shouldn’t be just little clones of the main events or passive gathering to remotely watch together an event happing elsewhere, but should have closed door talks, session and whatever unique may be able to provide. As otherwise i’ll just remote attend. If this objective is clear then pods are able to create tremendous added value to people that would normally just attend from remote.
3) F2F attending the main event is something we all know what is. So i won’t talk much about this except from the fact that the event you are attending is connected to pods and remote. So how can I engage with pods? or even with remote attendees? During my presence at #ECEU in london there was a google+station displaying each pods. But it was located on the stage where speaker were having their talk making it impossible to get there put some headset on, chose with with pod to engage with and get to know theem, or answer their question. I Think such an open pod-station will be of benefit by allowing f2f attendee to being able to go there and get to know the people, the program, and what is happing around the world in those Pods more then just watching at them like fishes on a bowl, staring back at us. Again this is not an easy job, as pods have their own things going on and we cannot just jump in it and interrupt whatever is going on.
In conclusion i can say that each of the experience have given me benefit that i the others was not being able to get. Hybrid events are an example where the sum is greater then the parts.
My suggestion is that events who wanna have “active pods” should just be made out of pods (no main event) in other world some kind of distributed event. Otherwise just don’t try to force PODS to be active but have them as gathering of remotes enjoying their own journey.
