One of the things I'm committed to doing in 2008 is organizing more public events. Last year, I ran a number of private interactive and intellectual discussions, which nurtured a desire to develop a larger and more public configuration for them.

To use a software development metaphor, my first public event was an alpha test, in that it was a raw and open exploration of a few concepts I've been developing or have seen in the wild and wanted to try myself.

Recently, there has been considerable innovation when it comes to event organizing, with the emergence of the BarCamp phenomenon as well as the Open Space movement. I am inspired by both, but still see room to incorporate my own sensibilities and experiences.

I've spent the last few years working in television and really studying the direction that industry is going, while also absorbing everything I can about production, both behind the scenes and on-camera. My approach to organizing events has been deeply impacted by this exploration of the television aesthetic and, conversely, my approach to television is heavily influenced by my love of live, interactive events.

The context to all this is, of course, the Internet, where I spend most of my time, and I'm always thinking how to bring the culture and properties of the Internet to live events and broadcast television. Often it has been the focus and/or subject matter. However, in the future, my intention is to run events in which the Internet is so ubiquitous as to no longer require explicit attention.

That is why I chose politics as the focus of my first event. I hoped to capture the zeitgeist of our time (with Obama inspiring a new generation) and tackle a subject that everyone should be able to relate to, one that lends itself to debate and disagreement.

Sponsor

When I started thinking of this event in early January, I came to the quick realization that I would need a sponsor. Good spaces aren't cheap in Toronto, and in addition to covering general costs, I wanted to ensure that the event itself was accessible in terms of the price of admission (which was $25 for those who could afford it, and no charge for those who could not).

One of the first thoughts I had was approaching the MaRS Centre, because they'd expressed openness and interest in a previous encounter and want to have more community events. I approached Peter Evans, the Venture Group Advisor, and he quickly got back to me with approval.

The MaRS team was great to work with, and it was a pleasure to get an extended inside look into an organization that surrounds itself with innovation and emerging ideas. Thanks go to all who work there but especially Ilse, Peter, Kevin, Rob, Heidi, and Allen.

One interesting thing I came upon when doing some post-event Googling was to find that Peter and Rob are part of the Riverdale Partners. So maybe I should be thanking that company as well. ;)

Space and Time

I spoke with Peter on February 5th, and then met with him three days later. At the meeting, I presented my initial concept of the event, which was pretty radical, to say the least, and we worked out a compromise that would be satisfactory to both myself and MaRS.

I was eager for the event to happen, and wanted to do it on the earliest available date, which turned out to be March 18th at 3pm, the day before a much larger event was being planned at MaRS called Experience Tech 08. Given that I had no budget, and the institution was providing space and support as part of their sponsorship, I had little influence in the timing.

In hindsight, it was a huge obstacle to start at 3pm. A ton of people contacted me saying they would have attended if it had been later, so the time affected my desire for accessibility.

Another big problem was the lack of mobile connectivity. While there was wifi available, not all mobile phones and devices could get a signal, and many attendees carried blackberries and PDAs instead of laptops. I also neglected to give instructions on how to connect to the wifi, which unfortunately is not entirely intuitive.

With that said, the space was amazing, and the support from the MaRS audio-visual crew was incredible. We were able to use two projectors and big screens to add interactive and visual elements, and at the conclusion of the event the MaRS staff were able to offer drinks and snacks.

Promotion

Due to the short time frame and lack of a budget, I used a combination of Facebook, email, and word of mouth to promote the event. MaRS also printed up some posters and postcards, which they sent out to their mailing list. I distributed some of the cards to places like the downtown universities, local cafes, the CBC, and via friends who took stacks to redistribute. Media coverage leading up to the event included a listing in the Globe and Mail and a live spot the day of on CBC Radio's Metro Morning.

Given that the promotion took place over all of three weeks, I was extremely happy with the extent to which people were aware of the event. The final turnout was over 100, probably closer to 150, and I believe we could have easily made it over 200 if had been held in the evening rather than the late afternoon. Also, since I was doing this event in a volunteer capacity, I had to spend most of my time over that three weeks focusing on other work. And MaRS was focusing on their Experience Tech 08 event. Given that we were all distracted, I think it was incredible we got the numbers we did in such a short time frame. This gives me hope that in the future, it will be possible to pull together events that respond to new and emerging phenomena in a rapid manner.

Audience

My goal was to create an event that would attract and appeal to as general and diverse an audience as possible. Maclean's columnist Kady O'Malley summed it up rather poetically:

"The audience was billed as 'diverse' - but that doesn't even begin to describe it. Self-satisfied hipsters sat cheek by jowl with alabaster-skinned coders, who stared with disbelief as academics waxed macrophilosophical, as though craving the ability to delete uncited claims, Wikipedia-style. Old-school party bagmen and campaign organizers glared impatiently at their BlackBerries, mentally calculating the billable hours being lost to esoteric discussions on 'community'. Social media, Web 2.0, whatever." - Inside the Queensway

Unfortunately, Kady's comments speak to a problem that arose: the greater the diversity of the audience, the larger the chances that specialists looking for something specific will start to tune out. When I ran the McLuhan Monday Night Seminars, I relished the range of individuals who would attend and share their unique perspectives. Clearly, one of the challenges to recreating this dynamic in a larger setting will be to balance the general audience's ability to understand and remain engaged with the need for valuable and insightful specialized intelligence.

The other characteristic I seek to cultivate is people's tendency to participate and interact. This comes about spontaneously when the audience is comfortable and inspired. Some of the ways I attempted to achieve this during the alpha test did not work, so I will try some new tactics for the beta test(s), explicitly by employing more human beings, as Kady correctly suggests in her review.

Another thing I'll change is the format of the event as a whole, since at the end the crowd was really eager to speak and get involved. The key will be to engage people early on and as often as possible, to get them up and active.

Nonetheless, I was really happy with the crowd that came out, and a great number of you have contacted me with your feedback and thoughts, which I genuinely appreciate. We really had a broad group of people speaking to the subject of the "Permananent Campaign" with a number of folk coming in from out of town. Thanks to all of you, and a special shout out to Chaitanya Kalevar who instead of a business card lives the permanent campaign by handing out a button promoting his website globalsurvival.ca.

Keynote and Demos

Originally my intention was to have an entirely alternative format to the event, however Peter Evans at MaRS convinced me to adopt elements of the traditional conference. I had already been speaking with Greg Elmer about some of his work, so he was my first choice for a keynote, in part to help promote his research, but also to offer an empirical foundation for the discussion afterwards.

Unfortunately Greg's research is really focused on blogs, and I was hoping to steer the focus of the event beyond blogs, which I largely failed to do. I also find it's hard to interact with a keynote, due to the length of such a presentation, however we did have some good questions for Dr. Elmer, and his research is now available to a broader audience.

We followed the keynote with three demos provided by Ontario based companies that are active in social media and have tools that are applicable to political campaigns. AideRSS from Waterloo, Sysomos from Toronto, and Iotum from Ottawa all displayed interesting web applications that help organize and manage information elements such as blogs, social media sources, and conference calls.

Unfortunately, while these demos did show interesting tech, I'm not sure how relevant they actually are to the political staffers and journalists in the crowd. Kady speaks to this in her review, and it's a good point. Instead of having demos from commercial companies, I could have demo'd open source technology that would have blown most in the audience away. Technology that is and will be used in campaigns to offer significant competitive advantages compared to others not yet aware of these tools. So this will definitely be changed in the beta test.

The Interactive Panel

The interactive panel was perhaps the most experimental element of the entire event. There were a number of things I was trying out, only some of which would be visible to the audience. The primary thing I wanted to try was create a panel that was both diverse politically, intellectually, professionally, but also when it comes to expertise. As a generalist, I like to believe in the innate capacity of any person to be an expert, given the right mix of stimulation and comfort. Unfortunately at this event I failed to do this, as this panel in particular suffered from a lack of focus. I take full responsibility for this, as it was my job as moderator to maintain focus, and I also should have employed the audience more in shaking up the panel and fostering greater debate.

One thing however that I was really happy about with regard to the panel was the lack of partisan bullshit and bickering. I'm rather partial to Robert Michels' analysis of political parties, and I often feel (like Jon Stewart) that partisan politics is one of the greatest impediments to democracy. The challenge in holding a political event is balancing the need to talk about political parties without having the event dominated by them. In this regard I chose panel participants who would be able to articulate their own political position without towing a party line. A number of people felt that this was not the case with Stephen Taylor, who is a web pundit for the Conservative party, however to give Stephen tons of credit, his performance on the panel focused more on the Internet in general, and he did not act as either an ideologue or a mouth-piece for the federal Conservative party.

Another dynamic I tried to balance on the panel was the difference between the insider and the outsider. Often political narratives are controlled by insiders who live in an insular Ottawa culture that doesn't acknowledge anyone outside of their sphere. So naturally there were insiders who were upset they were not included on the panel, and objected to my having people they did not already know represent viewpoints they felt they were better at expressing. One thing I will guarantee in any event that I organize is that no matter who shows up, you will always meet somebody new, and always be exposed to perspectives and attitudes that would otherwise be foreign to your social or professional circles.

Of course one of the ways to achieve this is via audience participation, which was the whole point of the panel. Unfortunately it took a while for the audience to get going, and once they were the event had to come to an end. Thus one of the lessons I learned was to involve the audience more from the outset, and as moderator involve more plants from the audience in addition to focusing and moving the discussion.

For this alpha test David Fingrut and Ken Chase were of great help, and I thank them for their willingness to help me with this experiment. In future events I intend to expand the role that they played, as well as employ videographers to film the audience and display said shots on a screen similar to how sporting events show fans on the big screen. The idea is to dissolve the stage and emphasize to the audience that they too are part of the show and should get involved. Perhaps a panel is the wrong idea and instead a looser configuration is required while still allowing for structure to maintain focus.

Twitter and the Web Jay

I've been using projected chat rooms as part of live events for some time. Generally this has been an IRC room with a web interface so that anyone could connect, and then a special IRC client can be used to display the room on a big screen. However when I started putting this event together in January and February it was clear that instead of IRC, twitter made more sense given its boom in popularity.

The problem unfortunately is that Twitter has yet to develop a stable tagging or channel system. So as a compromise I decided to use two formats, the hashtags.org system as well as the tweetscan website. Unfortunately the problem with hashtags.org is that it requires people follow the hashtags bot, and the problem with tweetscan is that it doesn't catch all tweets. During the event I got a tip on how to use hashtags without requiring everyone to follow the hashtags bot. However next time Ken and I will be using a custom twitter interface that we'll be developing for live events like this.

We decided to use the tag MaRS so as to encourage other events at the facility to also embrace the use of twitter during events. We chose MaRS rather than MaRSDD as the staff and community around the facility refer to themselves as Martians and have generally embraced the lingo and metaphors around the red planet.

With the exception of the keynote by Greg Elmer, the twitter activity was displayed before, during, and after the event on two main screens, one on the main stage, and another on a side wall, giving participants ample opportunity to express themselves and influence the event. Judy Rebick at one point referred to this as silent heckling, which while accurate, does not speak to a lot of the positive comments and contributions from audience members via twitter. I personally wanted there to be heckling both via twitter and out loud by people shouting in the room. Unfortunately it seems that twitter actually quiets the crowd a bit as people focus on typing instead of yelling. I'll have to balance this out in future events as I love the verbal dynamic of good heckling, jeers, and cheers.

My favourite tweet was from Katie Szy:

"Great interactive event at the #MaRS. Except for the guy next to me who took off his shoes (???)" - Source

Another element we employed at this event was a role I referred to as a Web Jay or web jockey who much like a disc jockey provides a kind of environmental or ambient form of entertainment. The purpose of this role is to provide visual distraction for the audience before the event and during the panel. The idea was that when a panelist referred to a website or YouTube video then the web jockey would try to surf to that resource in real time, bringing to life the words and concepts discussed by the speaker or audience.

Kevin MacKenzie did a great job in this role, especially given that for the most part he was improvising and just trying to keep up with a diffuse and sprawling conversation. In future events I will work to improve this role by using the web jockey to help me maintain the focus of the event. Often visual cues can play a powerful role in helping to return a discussion to the direction it was intended to follow.

Next: The Beta Test

The purpose of this report is both to reflect on this past event, but also to start thinking of the next one. The reason I described this as an alpha test was not only to be open about my experimentation, but also create a narrative of change as I move from the alpha stage to the beta phase. My next event will be billed as a beta test, although I may require multiple beta tests before I feel I've got a configuration I'm happy with and ready to really roll out.

Expect the beta test to add elements of integrated participatory theatre, a la Augusto Boal and his concepts around the theatre of the oppressed. I will also be using a different venue at a different time. It's not that MaRS isn't an amazing facility, it's that in order to carry this experiment further, I also need to try different locations. I will also use an entirely different panel configuration, addressing both the need to add focus and increase audience involvement. I will most likely keep the demos, however they will most definitely be non-commercial and focused on sharing technology and concepts that are otherwise unknown to the majority of participants (if possible).

I also have some thoughts on different sponsors, and possible ways in which these sponsors can be involved and benefit from the diverse audience that I am able to bring together. If you have any thoughts on this, this is an area I'm curious to get more feedback on, both from potential sponsors, but also from participants with concerns regarding their role and presence.

As one of the main differences between the alpha test and the beta test(s) will be the presence of video. I felt the alpha test was enough without adding some of the video elements I seek to experiment with. The beta tests on the other hand will be recorded and produced in a similar manner to a televised event. They will still involve interactivity, improvisation, and still focus on intelligent discussion that is also entertaining. However I am acutely conscious of the way in which cameras and video can change the dynamics of an event, hence my deliberate exclusion of this element from the alpha test. As with sponsorship, I'm curious to hear any feedback you may have in this area.

Mind you, while I made no plans for filming the alpha test, I certainly did not discourage any of the participants from shooting. Wayne MacPhail from RabbleTV was kind enough to upload his copy of the keynote, and I include it below for your enjoyment...