On November 28th I did something a little different and somewhat more challenging, I ran a Future Café for Paul Nunesdea at Visual Collab 2018 - a hybrid Café where some participants were in a room face-to-face (the RSA in London) and others were remote on their laptops running Zoom. They could have been anywhere in the world but were in Canada, US, Italy, Finland, Belgium and Portugal.
The event was not as difficult as it sounds as we had two large interactive touch screens in the room plus some high-tech microphones and video cameras courtesy of Jon Knight of Ascentae.
I hosted the room at the RSA and my good friend John Hovell hosted the Zoom room from Washington DC.
As if this were not enough, we are also used some innovative software Nureva Span Workspace from Nureva to allow participants (both local and remote) to capture ideas and insights on virtual post-it notes that they posted to a virtual wall in the room (one of the big screens) from their smartphones. This was really quick and easy to do.
It was a bit of an experiment but it worked exceptionally well and we learnt a great deal about how to do it better next time. I am sure this type of interactivity for large globally distributed organizations has got to be a wave of the future.
You can watch a short video clip here to get a feel for the set up or take a look at these photos posted on Facebook.
I plan to fully document the process including how the technology all hang together and share it in my blook at some point.
