Preconference work

Ingrid Olausson ingrid.olausson at pi.se
Thu Jun 25 02:24:56 PDT 1998


What happens if nobody comes forward to announce issues? I have always had faith that this will never occur - and that is what I tell clients when they ask this question. But in the last OS with 240 people this was about to happen. It took several minutes to get 3 issues on the bulletin board. We had already told them that they couldnt leave the conference complaining that their issue didn't come up, there was only one person to blame etc. The group was extremely shy and people didn´t want to speak in public. Specially not in a microphone. And they didn´t want to step into the circle. We had to meet them with the microphone, or read the issues for them. At last we had 22 issues on the wall. But it took a long time.
My question is: would it be a good thing to break the group into pairs or smaller group to talk for a few minutes about topics? Just to break the ice. Or perhaps a preconference discussion on the network? The problem is that you don't know before the conference how they will react. I have seen many conferences where the people just throw themselves into the process.
Ingrid



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