VizThink Europe 2008 Recap: General Session 4
To close out VizThink Europe Tom & facilitated a final session focused on the visual thinking community. We wanted to close out the conference by helping to connect the attendees with other visual thinkers from their region or country. We wanted to facilitate the attendees learning a bit more about each other in hopes of creating some more local relationships to help boost the visual thinking community between conferences.
This also being our first conference in Europe we also wanted to take the opportunity to get a pulse on how the attendees felt about the conference and what we could do to help grow both the community, and VizThink’s presence.
Tom started off running everyone through a post-it brainstorming exercise to generate ideas after a few minutes we had each table create four categories based on the ideas and finally had them sort the ideas from easiest to implement to hardest (the “blue sky” ideas). While we’re still processing the final outputs it looks like some great information was generated and in the future we’ll try to present some of the ideas we’re electing to develop.
After this exercise we moved on to the portion where we wanted to get people from similar areas grouped together so they could start making some connections. Keeping up with the human infographics that we’d been doing throughout the conference we asked everyone to arrange themselves based on their country or region (we had grouped some smaller groups of attendees into regions rather than country – i.e. “North America” as there were only 4 or 5 attendees).
We then did a quick exercise, similar to the one we did on day 1, where we asked everyone at the table to find connections between each other – to make things a little more interesting we put a prize on the line for the table that could come up with the most connections in five minutes.
Team Netherlands ultimately won, with an uncountable number of connections (pictured above) – as I walked around the roo they were certainly the most enthusiastic and inventive when it came to finding matches…
“Who wants to win this?” :: Big cheer as a dozen hands draw lines to the middle ::
Finally we did an exercise where we had each person take an index card, put their name & city on it and then asked them to list one visual thiking skill/concept they could teach their community on the card as well. I did a similar exercise during my session in San Francisco earlier this year and I like it for a couple of reasons.
As Dave Gray mentioned at the outset of the conference everyone can draw – this is similar as I think everyone has something that they can share or pass on, whether in a one-on-one context or presented to a group. VizThink conferences draw a wide variety of people in terms of jobs, roles & skills – there’s a lot each attendee knows that many others would not, I hope this exercise helped some people that they have something to share.
As a side effect this exercise also gives community organizers a list of future facilitators for the free community events that are now happening around the world. Two of our largest groups of attendees were from the Netherlands & the United Kingdom where we now have communities established and hopefully this exercise helped the organizers get a better sense of what skills exist in their community.
A slideshow of photos from the session is below:
In Closing
All in all we considered VizThink Europe a big success, initial reactions seemed to be very positive and it had that same buzz during the event that the San Francisco conference did earlier in the year. If you blogged about it, took photos or have uploaded video please be sure to tag the content with “vteu08″ – over the next few days I’ll be scouring the web trying to get together a collection of content online about the conference and will post that summary on the blog at a later date.
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Missed the conference? VizThink 2009 is coming up February 22-25, 2009 in San Jose, California and registration is now open. The early registration discount ends November 30 so now is the time to get the best possible price to attend.
