Notes on how to run an online conference for your Medium publication or other group of trusted speakers.

Four weeks to launch 68 speakers and register 1600 attendees

A few weeks ago I put on an online conference for the authors of two of my Medium publications and the coaches at my company, Coach.me. There were 68 speakers and 1600 attendees.

It wasn’t an unconference, but I used a lot of the principles of unconferences to make it work. The main concept that made this work was that I trusted the community of speakers to come up with their own session topics rather than spending a lot of time doing a call for proposals and the time consuming vetting that comes with it. If one of our authors or coaches wanted to speak on a topic then our assumption was that they would do a good job and that some attendees would be interested. And that approach overwhelmingly worked.

One nice thing about having so many sessions is that if an attendee went to one they didn’t like, they could leave and go to a different one. Unconferences call that the law of two feet (use them!) and since we were online, we called it the law of two clicks (click to a different session if you aren’t happy).

We didn’t charge attendees and we tried to make the sessions be more about discussion than lecture. And so that meant there were a lot of authors/coaches chatting directly with the audience.