The first session of a peer conference, the roundtable, serves three broad purposes. First, it defines and models an active, interactive, and safe conference environment. Second, the roundtable provides a structured forum for attendees to meet and learn about each others’ affiliations, interests, experience, and expertise. And third, the session uncovers the topics that people want to discuss and share, as well as indicating the level of interest in each topic.
A roundtable always begins with a description and explanation of conference ground rules and then asks attendees to commit to them. The ground rules, described in my book, send participants the following powerful messages:
“While you are here, you have the right and opportunity to be heard.”
“Your individual needs and desires are important here.”
“You will help to determine what happens at this conference.”
“What happens here will be kept confidential. You can feel safe here.”
“At this conference, you can create, together with others, opportunities to learn and to share.”
Roundtables provide a structured, safe way for attendees to learn about each other early in the conference. During the session, people discover topics that interest others. They get a sense of the depth of interest in these topics, and they find out who has experiences that they want to connect with and explore further.
At a conventional conference, people meet and learn about each other slowly, mostly outside the programmed sessions. A peer conference roundtable introduces every attendee to every other participant, right at the start of the event. (Peer conferences with more than sixty attendees use two simultaneous roundtables, coupled with a buddy system for sharing information between the two sessions.) Hearing a little about each person present makes it much easier to introduce yourself to anyone with whom you share a particular interest.
Regular conferences imply a hierarchy of participant expertise, where some people are presenters at sessions, and the others are not. This difference is enshrined in the conference program for all to see. At a peer conference roundtable, every person is given the same amount of time to share with other attendees. This flattens the initial conference hierarchy as it implies that any attendee may possess something of value for her peers, allowing the conference process itself to uncover what experiences are of value to the people present.
By not making assumptions, either about what content is of value or about who has valuable content to share, a peer conference roundtable provides a safe environment for the participants to express and explore what is truly of value to them. The practical result of this approach is remarkable: valuable topics are uncovered and valuable participants discovered that were simply unknown to the conference organizers. I have seen this occur at every roundtable I have facilitated.
Finally, asking every attendee to share at a roundtable has a profound effect. I’ve found that the simple act of starting a conference with structured group sharing provides a powerful, infectious model of interaction to attendees and creates an intimate atmosphere that is rarely experienced at a traditional conference.
The heart of every roundtable is provided by each attendees' answers, in turn, to the three questions:
“How did I get here?”
“What do I want to have happen?”
“What experience do I have that others might find useful?”