I have to admit I was dubious, but now I’m a believer. It frankly sounded too low-tech, when Dr. Suzanne FitzGerald advocated roundtable paper presentations as the heart of IAOC’s first International Conferences. Having just completed our conference at Valley Forge, I highly recommend you try it. It’s just one of those things you have to experience to appreciate.

The roundtable paper presentation was new to me, but it’s been around for a long time. IPR has been using the roundtable format successfully in Miami for nine years, at its annual International Public Relations Research Conference. Here’s how it worked at the IAOC conference:

Each person whose paper is accepted to be given at the conference participates in a roundtable session where the presenter sits at a table with perhaps six to seven interested conference participants. There are three or four roundtable presentations in the room at one time. The presenter discusses his/her paper for 15-20 minutes. This is interactive, with those listening able to ask questions or make comments. The small discussion group provides an intimate and interactive atmosphere that results in far more lively engagement than what you experience in more formal  presentations.

After 15-20 minutes, time is called, and listeners may then go to another roundtable discussion, or stay where they are if they want to hear more from the same presenter. People who experienced this process for the first time told me that it provided the best conference experience they had ever encountered, and that was my feeling as well.

The conference was truly one of the best I have ever attended. I can't say enough about the quality of the roundtable presentations and the satisfaction of being able to interact with the presenters on such a personal scale. Sitting together at a table you are so much more open to connecting with the presenter than when you're in a large audience. The questions come more freely. The answers are part of the conversation, not a lecture.

Not Just for Academics
As you might expect, I heard some eye-opening presentations from researchers in the university community. Just as gratifying, I heard some equally compelling stories from practitioners. For example, the first session I sat in was Experiments in Online Channels for Internal Communication at Lockheed Martin by Jeanine Zeitvogel, Director of Communications at Lockheed Martin in Marlton, NJ.

If I recall the numbers correctly, Lockheed Martin has some 135,000 employees, and something like 90,000 of them are engineers and PhDs, ranging in age from 20 to 80, spread across the globe, with many working at customer locations. As a company of knowledge workers, it’s becoming increasingly important for them to capture the knowledge gained from their work.

The problem Zeitvogel encountered is the same that has brought down many knowledge management (KM) initiatives: it goes against human nature to share the secrets from a lifetime of experience, when people perceive that knowledge to give them a competitive advantage. You’ll have to come back to learn how Zeitvogel broke down the barriers and developed an online community of trust and sharing. I’ve invited her to host a KM blog week.