Why plenarys and panels suck
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What are plenaries good for?
- Top down/one way communication
- Checking email/facebook
- Media (and Social Media) Attention
- Biz card printers
- Delivering Lectures to scale
- Getting professional credit
- Assumed shared experience
- Audience interaction
- Easy to check out/opt-out
- strengthening egos
- Paid mental holidays
- Maintaining Hierarchies
- Powerpoint
- Perpetuating existing power structures by
- Allowing for institutional networking
- Face value and token appreciation (look we have a black woman on our panel!)
- Refining content for one-way distribution
- Show and exchange different perspectives within that power structure
What are plenaries bad for?
- Lack of buy-in, getting shared ownership
- Participatory learning
- Going deep
- Getting work done
- Inclusiveness
- Benefiting presenters
- High participant satisfaction
- Control of content
- Building trust
How do we end them:
- Focus on goals and furthering organisational agendas
- The need to build real consensus
- Hack the system - if you have an auditorium with tables get the tables to talk to each other.
- Have clear outcomes to evaluate the event against
- Get organisers to realise what real 'shared-ownership' looks like
- Crowdsource agenda's