OS Conferences for Profit
Convenor: Nev Kennard
Participants: Karen Davis, Lavonne Boyd, Andrew Donovan, Michel Kukla, Gayle Hardie
THE CORE QUESTION IS HOW TO ADVERTISE AND ATTRACT PEOPLE TO AN “EVENT” OF A DIFFERENT FORMAT TO NORMAL CONFERENCES - e.g. Absence of highly paid.Celebrity Speakers.
1. Use some “Names” as drawcard participants.
2. User endorsements and testimonials of recognisable people.
3. Use an “Expert” or two to introduce.
4. Have an After-Dinner Speaker” ?? (probably not).
5. List names of Participants on the Web-Site as they register.
6. The Title and Theme is important.
7. Words like “Exploring Leading edge questions”
8. Use the worts “Forum”, “Event” to distinguish it from normal such “Conferences”.
9. Say things like-
10. Partner-up with appropriate organisations for mailing lists and promotional help.
11. Share profits with an appropriate cause or organisation - e.g. Open Space furtherance
12. In the spirit of Open Space have “Open Book” transparency of accounting and reporting - reveal it all.
13. Use Open Space techniques in admin.
14. Use Open Space software and offer on-going participation.
15. Have web-site link to OS Web-site.
ChrisCorrigan? adds online:
Obviously, not being present for this conference, I missed the link between OS Conferences for Profit and the subsequent discussion which seems to focus on invitation and pre-meeting types of concerns. The session title attracted me because I guess I've never thought of using OST purely as a profit making venture. To me, it seems like "Brainstorming for Profit." Why would anyone attend a brainstorming session on something just to generate profit for someone else? LIkewise, I feel the value of OST is not as a marketable process in itself, but rather in what it can do for an organization. Seems to me if you want to really make money from using OST, convene one with a sponsior who is looking as cutting costs (see the other topic) and contract with them to take 10% of whatever is saved as a result of the conference.
But OST purely for profit? Nah.
Anyway, the substance of the conversation seems to deal with issues relevent to invitation and that's cool. Writing invitations is fine art. Perhaps we (who's we, eh?) could create an invitation archive in this Wiki somewhere to archive good invites as well as templates, pointers and processes. Writing invitations is perhpas THE most important task in planning an OST, so maybe a worldwide collected resource would be useful...hmmmm.
there is an invitation archive at http://www.michaelherman.com ...click 'sample invites' when you get to the homepage. hoping to migrate that to wiki sometime early next year.