A peek behind the curtain… A return to in-person networking… Exploring power dynamics…
Being in Accra a couple weeks ago for the first in-person ICT4D conference since Covid was a really interesting, and enjoyable experience. And, for me at least, quite unlike any conference I have been to before as, for the first time, I was “behind the scenes” working with CRS as one of the organisers.
A peek behind the curtain…
A big thank you to Sonja and Nora for inviting me to work with them on the conference this year. It was facinating to see how things work and it really explained some of the things I had wondered about in previous ICT4D conferences. I don’t want to give away too much but was really great to gain a better understanding of things like:
- Quite how many submissions are recieved and across such a wide range of subjects, organisations and levels of quality…
- Juggling desires for interactivity, diversity of speakers, different types of sessions, thematic streams, cross-cutting themes etc. with harsh realities of time, space, resources available to organise, support needed by speakers and plain and simple the need for so many people to have a speaking slot to be able to justify attendance to their HR/other departments
- The amount of work needed to “herd the cats” (even with track leads from the partners taking some of the burden, still a lot!)
- And of course, above all, how quickly the best laid plans can start to come apart when you have one tiny little issue like no internet across most of West Africa… (and kudos to everyone who worked through this and kept things on track!)
A return to in-person networking…
I’m sorry but no matter how much people say that remote / hybrid events can be as good or better through zoom/similar… I just don’t buy it…
Sure, the expense and environmental impact of travel is important, and really good hybrid facilitation can make a massive difference, but nothing quite beats walking past someone in a corridor, glancing at their badge and realising you’ve been emailing each other for years and have never met before IRL. A situation that happened to me about a dozen times over the course of the conference, leading to some of the most intreresting side-conversations I had all week!
Exploring power dynamics…
My own workshop on the Thursday (Digital Transformation for who? Is there a power-dynamic lens missing from current approaches to DX) was the first time I have gone beyond casual and 1-1 conversations, to bring together a group to explore the opportunities we might be missing by not bringing digital transformation and shift the power work together.
While the conversations didn’t all go where I expected (‘power’ is a huge topic, and of course everyone brings their own perspective and interests), I think it was a great and valuable set of conversations – I’ll be blogging on that more once I have a chance to fully synthesise the outputs.
I wanted to flag it here, as the session prompted me to finally do something I have been planning since I hosted a similar conversation at the Shift the Power Summit in Bogota last year – to set up an online community mailing list for all those interested in the overlap of these two spaces. I’ve noticed there are a ton of really good digital/DX people… plenty of passionate and talented people working to Shift The Power… but a dearth of practitioners or researchers who are interested in and understand both. And yet both groups have so much to offer to and learn from each other.
If you are interested, you can join here.
Were you also at ICT4D 2024 in Ghana?
If so, I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments below!
A huge thank you to all the organisers, to all of my Big Discussion leads, moderators and panellists, and to everyone else who made ICT4D 2024 such a great few days (too many to list, but will tag as many as I can when I push this to LinkedIn)!
See you all again in two years.
Matt Haikin 