How Scandinavian conferences are redefining conferencing
With digital communication tools and a globalised business world the need to meet in person has been increasing for some decades now. People meet to share experiences, create trusting bonds, have fun and make business.
To streamline and create reasons to do the above conferences have been booming in numbers. Having followed this space for a while and with conference high season* in Scandinavia coming up there are some observations to be made. Here’s three trends that I find interesting:
Conferences are becoming festivals
Personal and business life are in many industries merging. This means that is not enough for a conference to educate employees. Humans expect to learn in entertaining and meaningful ways, also when the clock says working hours.
The Conference in Malmö started as a two day conference and then expanded to do side events across the days surrounding the main event. This year the side event program is rebranded as The Festival.
Copenhagen’s Techfestival was founded last year with the intention to break out from conference centres and mimic the music festival model by building stages in the parking lot in the city’s meatpacking district. As well as utilising a lot of bars and communal spaces in the area.
In Stockholm Gather is based on four parts, one of them being a music festival. Gather’s url of course have festival in it, gatherfestival.com
It’s for good reasons that conferences are making this shift. It’s about telling the world that learning new stuff requires an immersive experience, stimulating all senses and not just one or two and that the experience goes beyond staring at powerpoints. It’s a question of positioning, enabling these convenings to communicate that they are trying to offer something new and frankly festival just sounds more sexier than conference.
Also, the move from conference to festival is changing the offering from a curator serving a prepared meal of one way fits all insights to offering a smorgasbord for participants to pick and choose from.
I’m writing this from MAD symposium, noma’s food community convening. It’s on an island in Copenhagen with a big red circus tent for talks, a restaurant tent for delicious meals and twenty small tents for break out sessions. I’m wearing a wristband, walking on wood chips and feel very much like being at a festival.
From stage based talks, to peer to peer conversations
The conference format is often shamed for being one directional and too lean back of an experience. To address it organizers are starting to blend the good old amphitheater type of gatherings with new formats that build on collaborative peer level conversations.
Techfestival has an extensive five day program of summits and meet-ups. Where summits are industry leader led full day conversations about the future of a very specific field and meet-ups being led by local communities about the state of their industry. There’s 30 summits and 100 (!) meet-ups, that create a peer to peer conversational setup at scale.
040x040 is a community-driven format in which creatives from Hamburg and Malmö meet once a year in the respective city. People form the hosting city is responsible for putting together a program with conversations, visits etc that plays out across the cities.
Gather is running ten labs where participants are invited to co-create on real solution to the problems the conference address. me Convention, also in Stockholm do workshops and mentor sessions. The Conference’ The Festival is 70 events during six days, many of which are for small groups and based on conversations rather than lectures.
Together with the collaborative feel of inviting participants to build together the smaller scale and distributed program also creates more entry points to signing up which in return make the knowledge sharing much more accessible to a lot of people.
From industry focus to society perspective
Tech, design and other relatively new industries slowly but surely maturing. With it comes a need to be responsible for more that just the product you put out. Browsing the about sections of the conferences mentioned above paints this picture in a quite explicit way:
Gather “investigates society and its future, embraces complexity and bursts filter bubbles”.
The Conference: “We’re all part of a system (although our filter bubbles don’t really cater to that system) and at The Conference we want to explore holistic views on ways forward, allowing for an understanding and respect for systems and ecosystems.”
Techfestival: “Once counterculture, tech is now everywhere with powerful access and impacts. The time is right for a new conversation on tech. One that takes us beyond Silicon Valley culture, innovation hype and AI-fear. One that anchors tech in society with human answers for progress.”
Interestingly there’s a similar trend in music festivals. In Scandianvia Heartland, Way Out West, Roskilde Festival and others are having societal conversation by adding stages for talks. Almost funny when you think about it, how conferences and music events are becoming more alike just with a slight, or quite big, weight in one of the directions. Personally I’m very fond of the fact that conversations around business, culture and society are merging, that’s exactly what our societies need.
Final thoughts and more to come
Although I love that these developments bring about co-creation and make knowledge sharing car more accessible and relevant, I also feel that they’re diluting important parts of the experience that the art of curation bring about. I’m a believer in storytelling and that hard topics require a carefully crafted context that just seems harder do swing in a smorgasbord model than in a plated dish.
I also have a sense that adding quantity comes at the expense of quality. The addition of art elements is a good example where, although the ambition is good, the resources to make it well isn’t there (that goes for a lot of music festivals art endeavours as well).
Watch out for a another post on trends I see in other places of the world where focus and coherent storytelling are main selling points. (The follow up post now published: Intimacy in a quantity craving world)
*conference’s in Scandinavia the first weeks of september:
me Convention, Stockholm, September 4–6
The Conference, Malmö, September 4–5 (The Festival September 1–7)
Techfestival, Copenhagen, September 5–9
Gather, Stockholm, September 13–15
040x040, Malmö, September 26–27
Disclaimer: I worked with The Conference for six years, have been advising the MAD team this summer and I’m currently heading the talks program at Techfestival.
