Allen Gunn from Aspiration (www.aspirationtech.org) organizes and facilitates events for the tech sector and non-profit organizations, bringing together practitioners to talk and share knowledge from their particular backgrounds and experiences. He talks about how real interactive sessions can improve the quality of the knowledge experience for all participants.

Interview Summary:

What is a participatory, interactive event?

The most indicative trait of an interactive workshop is that all participants are allowed to speak from the beginning. I think it is critical to build an awareness and an encouragement to people's voices. A participatory session is one in which you don't only ask for people's input, but you design the agenda and the overall trajectory of the gathering to be driven to where the participants want to go, and the facilitation role is to provide group navigation towards a goal or a set of goals.

Some forms of interactivity like polling or asking to raise hands are not interactive for me because people are interacting but are not in control of their destiny. When participants feel in control of the path that they take through the event, that is the ultimate participatory criteria.

What is the difference between different panels and sessions, and more participatory gatherings?

You can start from a simple mathematical analysis, in a panel one person is speaking and many are listening, and you could assert that what is being said is not necessarily relevant to all the listeners. With more interactive formats where people can get in groups and talk in more focused topics, and where the questions are driven by participants as opposed to a presentation of an expert, you get more value to the listeners. It also touches in what your philosophy of capacity building is. When you are in a traditional panel or presentation mode you are validating an expert culture, you're validating that there needs to be a smart person in the front of the room for capacity gain to occur or any learning to transpire. I think that holds the NGO sector back and any other sector trying to use gatherings as a transfer of knowledge, because it is a very inefficient, one to many transmission instead of a many-to-many transfers happening in parallel.

What are some of the challenges when organizing events with large groups of multi-cultural, multi-lingual people?

The first obvious challenge is language. You need to know your requirements are and make sure the expectations are in control and honour your multi-ingual process all the way through .It is a complex problem. The second issue on multi-cultural multi-lingual engagements people tend to be tired, there is a geographic piece, there will be low energy and tiredness especially at the start of the event. There is also a social language challenge, as you narrate the trajectory of the agenda to people with different languages and cultures, you have to find a middle ground where you make sense to different audiences.

What are some of the technology tools that you have integrated successfully into participatory processes?

I wouldn't call it a complete success but I think the use of wikis add a lot of value to our events just for capturing the raw notes from the sessions. Individuals are able to refer to those later. In a perfect world we could transform those into more polished assets. I am a fan of del.icio.us, flickr and technorati where by using strategic tagging you can obtain very good aggregation of content: you can see all pictures of the event, see what people posted on their blogs, bookmarks etc. Those are things we use with email always being the backbone of any gathering both before and during the gathering.

When you're talking about participatory gatherings the emphasis should be on what technologies are not there, discouraging people to multitasks during the event (using their laptops or checking email) because that sucks energy out of the event and reduces the overall participatory experience. For us, with technology, less is more. Pick your tools, know why you're using them, encourage people to focus on those, and the rest of the time don't let technology be central in the participatory experience.