It’s been a lot of fun to be part of the team behind Reclaim Open last week. I love the buzz that comes with delivering an event months in the planning, especially when there’s so much innovation in the mix. In this post I share some reflections on the process behind the scenes, but first… you might ask why go a different path when it comes to online events? There are plenty of tried and test formats, platforms and services out there, so there’s no real need to re-invent the format yet again. Or is there?
Tailored format: A first amongst firsts
Reclaim Open has always been a creative, one of a kind conference, celebrating many firsts in its inspiring history. So it feels only fitting that this year’s format followed in the footsteps of firsts and broke new ground taking the conference online, onto a blog near you, to DS106Radio, to the game table, the quiz, the keynote panel and student showcase. It’s a privilege when you work in a community of digital educators that you *can* push things into a new direction and still take enough people with you to make it work.
Likewise, working in a small team with lots of competing priorities and limited resources always brings out the best in conference planning to my mind, because you focus on what you really, really want to do for and with your participants, rather that rehashing things just because you’ve done them before.
Jim and I have a running joke about conferencing firsts, and I feel it’s certainly time to sing it one more time: “We did it again.”
Blog-A-Thon
We started the event with twelve hours of blogging, with a post being published on the hour, every hour. It was fabulous, and offered space and time for conversations to develop, for connections to be made.
As with every format that you invent on the fly, there were some minor practical issues in the first hour or two, but after a little while everyone got into the stride of the Blog-A-Thon and the chat bloomed. It brought back memories of amazing conference formats like PressED, and TAGSExplorer Twitter-hashtag conversations, and reminded me precisely why it can be so much fun to work on the open web. Swapping rss feeds and blog roll links was in full swing by the time the first afternoon rolled around, and the community of practice group was very active alongside new faces and first time participants.
Digitals virtuosity
Switching between formats, moving from radio to website, and from webinar to game show takes A LOT of doing. It only works because the team behind the event has the highest level of digital skills, confidence and tech set up.
Briefing staff in whatever format you use to ensure speakers get the support they need and have a good experience is one of the most crucial things about online conference delivery in my experience, and it’s hard enough when your are using one platform to do everything. It becomes a lot more demanding when you switch between formats, managing dozens of speakers across time zones, from single individuals with slides to group plenaries that host 8 speakers simultaneously.
Big kudos to everyone involved for upping their game!
It takes heart
In this age of AI and digital abundance it’s easy to loose heart, to feel that one’s voice doesn’t really matter, especially if what you are interested in goes against the dominant narrative. It takes a lot of heart to make your voice heard above the noise, and one of my hopes for the conference was that it would deliver a much needed dose of inspiration and encouragement to everyone participating – and wow, it really did!
Bonnie Stewart’s keynote was simply awesome and helped open up that conversation during the event, and is definitely worth re-watching and is the student showcase that brought together four very different, innovative projects and opened up the keynote stage to emerging voices from the open web.
… and my session
If you’d like to take a closer look at my own session, then listen to last week’s podcast episode in which I explain a bit about the back story and share highlights from my session. Thanks to Bryan Mathers for the awesome illustration:
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