Next week (March 21-23) is the Nexus for Change conference at BGSU in Ohio. Over 330 people have registered… a full house! I’ve been working with the 70-person (!) Design Team for several months to come to a final design for this conference of change practitioners, scholars, leaders and activists. The “final touch” details are being put in place and the amazing staff at BGSU is working hard to fulfill an endless series of requests.
It is NOT your typical talking-heads conference. Rather it is an inclusive, participatory, multi-dimensional gathering that seeks to explore, capture, and extend ideas and relationships around what is possible given the phenomenal experience of the people in the room. As a group of people who work with systemic change from different perspectives, we seek to get to know each other and discover what will be possible as a result of our strengthened relationships.
There is a Conference Central page linked from the Nexus site for folks around the world who want to tune in. The conference will be blogged by several people, and there is a public Flickr group (nexusforchange) for images of the event. You can post your burning questions and ah-ha insights. We also have some special guests like Harrison Owen who will be participating in the conference via on-site buddies with Skype video conferencing. If you know someone who is attending, you could ask them to be your Skype buddy as well.
An amazing amount of experience will be in the room for 2 days. To capture as much as possible, we have a team of graphic facilitators who will be creating visual representations of conference activities. And we have a TV crew and a radio crew on-site doing some live streaming of portions of the conference.
To get a taste of what’s to come, check out the Pre-Conference Online Fish Bowl we produced a few weeks ago. It includes a podcast telephone conversation with Harrison Owen, Jean Bartunek, Nancy Badore, and Marv Weisbord.
