At the flagship annual meeting of NTEN: Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, organizers know they have an agenda that will be compelling to the more than 2,000 attendees because all of the content over the three-day event is crowdsourced. It’s a logistical balancing act that requires the organization’s staff to oversee and manage a weeks-long collective conversation as suggestions and feedback pour in.
For its upcoming 2016 event in San Jose, California, C.E.O. Amy Sample Ward said the group is using a modified version of IdeaScale, a cloud-based crowdsourcing platform.
The submission period for content lasts about five weeks, and participants can submit as many as two session ideas they would like to lead, see other submissions, and up- or down-vote them, Ward said. The down-vote option initially caused some consternation among proposers of rejected ideas, but Ward said the push and pull eventually strengthened the submissions by encouraging would-be session leaders to reach out to the naysayers through the platform’s comment system to ask how their ideas could be improved.
“We also had a number of folks who found ideas that were like theirs and left comments saying, ‘I’d like to join,’” Ward said.
After the submission period ends, the community has a few weeks to vote on their favorite. From there, NTEN’s steering committee votes on the winners, then the group’s staff goes through and vets the choices to make sure there’s a good mix of topics represented.
“If there’s a measure of success it could certainly be that it is something we couldn’t do away with as the community is integral to the success of the conference and this is part of providing the community a clear path for creating the conference they want,” Ward said.
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