This Tuesday through Friday, June 19th – 22nd, I will be attending, presenting, and Virtually Connecting at the OLC Innovate conference in New Orleans. I’m excited to take the lead on our presentation Fishbowl: So what’s Virtually Connecting all about anyway? on Thursday the 21st at 11:15 am in Oak Alley (4th floor) of the Sheraton Hotel. If you are at OLC and would like to come by it would be great to see you or if you are virtual you can view the hangout portion of the  presentation here, here, or here.

There are a bunch of us that are presenting including Maha Bali, Whitney Kilgore, Alan Levine, Rebecca Hogue, Apostolos Koutropoulos, Patrice Torcivia Prusko, and Andrea Rehn. We will have some participants that are more experienced with VConnecting including Sundi Richard and Susan Adams who both just stepped up to take on more responsibilities on the virtual side of this conference.

What the heck is a fishbowl?

Virtually Connecting is all about informal small group conversation. The struggle was to find a way to adapt what we do into a larger group formal presentation. Rebecca was the one who suggested the fishbowl exercise. In this format, circles of chairs are set up around a smaller group at the center who are having the conversation. The larger group is there to listen while the center focuses on the conversation.

Our twist will be that it will not just be a regular conversation going on in the center but a Virtually Connecting session. We will be joined by Laura Gogia and A. Micael Berman as our onsite guests to explore questions around the ethos of the OLC conference.

So how is it going to work?

I’m taking sort of a meta role on this session along with some others in our team. I’ve put together a slide deck which I will embed below and I will give a short 5min presentation/lightning talk at the beginning while the virtual and onsite buddies are getting connected.

Alan will be our virtual buddy for this session, he will be welcoming our virtual participants, waiting for us to connect onsite, and will ultimately take the VC session live on the Internet.

Whitney will be our onsite buddy and will be connecting with Alan and welcoming Laura and Michael as they arrive onsite.

As the conversation is happening Rebecca, Andrea, Patrice, and I will hang out in the audience taking pictures and quietly answering any side questions that people might have.

After about 20min or so we will open it up for Q&A on the topic or on Virtually Connecting as a movement. Audience members can come forward and jump into the recorded session or we can relay them if they don’t want to be in the livestream.

Some questions I have…

I’m really not sure if the facilitates at the Sheraton will be able to accommodate a circle. So, we may have to be more lecture style depending on the shape of the room. I hope that works out okay.

I’m hoping that Whitney can connect to the hangout on her laptop while I run the presentation from mine and that the switch to the projector (and the OLC live stream) can be seamless between them with just a cable switch when the moment comes… but I’m really not sure.

So, this session is not completely fool proof. But that is a part of what VConnecting is all about – not knowing all of the answers beforehand and not knowing exactly what you are going to say or how things are going to turn out. Of course in the case of a formal presentation we have to structure things a little more but that is such a part of who we are that it can’t go away completely.

… And of course – the why.

What is the purpose of this fishbowl session. Well, for me there are several.

There is of course that core conversation between those in the session about the spirit and culture of the conference. I’ve been watching as Laura has been doing amazing work with creating digital adventures at the conference through the PlugIN lounge. Michael brings us a conference history, as I understand, he has been a part of participating in this organization for some time – I don’t completely understand all of the iterations of this conference myself so I’ll save my questions for him for the session.

Of course we also want to explain what Virtually Connecting is and why it is so important. Why would you want to give access to those that are not present at a conference and to those that maybe have not even paid anything? Why is informal conversation important as a part of the virtual conference experience and how do you even do it? How is participating in Virtually Connecting a form of professional development?

I’m not exactly sure we will get to dive as deep on those big questions about VConnecting as I would like, with everything else that we have going on, but I do plan to touch on them a bit. At the very least we will be giving an example of what VConnecting is and how it works, we’ll have a great conversation with some really interesting people, and we’ll have some fun. It is our birthday after all 🙂

If you are at the conference we are in Oak Alley (4th floor) on Thursday the 21st at 11:15am CDT.

If you are not at the conference there are lots of opportunities to connect with Virtually Connecting. All dates and times of our session are listed on our website.