Curating a programme for International Design in Government Conference 2024
Learnings and practical tips for designing a conference experience
International Design in Government Conference 2024 in Helsinki brought together over 200 public servants and other experts to share experiences around the conference theme of Systems change and futures. The conference organisation was a volunteer effort.
This mini blog series is about organising, curating and designing a conference experience. We want to recap and share how this journey has been for us — the core team organising the conference. This blog will share some of the key aspects of the organisation and our learnings. We hope this inspires others to organise such community events as well!
Co-creating a programme
Emerging topics as maturity was increasing
We felt that we needed to have a specific theme for the conference because the maturity of our community and design in government in general has been increasing from those early years before COVID when we had the previous conferences. With a higher maturity, perhaps there would be more value in seeking out what is emerging, rather than gathering around the topics that seemed most familiar.
Understanding our challenges together
There seemed to be different types of changes and challenges for designers in government that needed to be addressed in the conference programme curation. We had also been running our own national futures process that aimed at understanding these changes and use foresight tools to help develop ideas where our community wanted to evolve towards. It seemed important to use this conference to perhaps launch a communal investigation into what our futures would look like — how is design in government evolving?
Value of co-creation
International design in government community has been growing quite a bit and there are almost 5 000 people in the community Slack group. Online community calls seemed popular and there was a general feeling that this community is active. Yet, we did not know exactly what emerging topics would resonate with the community. It seemed important to co-create the conference programme as much with the community as possible. This could create ownership and commitment for the community.
Our process of programme curation
Our volunteer team created a process to co-create the programme with the wider community. This included the following steps:
- Volunteer workshop
- Call for ideas
- Call for speakers
- Review process
- Programme tracks
Call for ideas
We had gathered a group of interested people from Finland, Estonia, Sweden and the UK to participate in a volunteer workshop to give a first go on ideating themes and topics for the conference. We used this as a basis for the Call for Ideas. We included a voting on preselected topics and open questions on people’s interests and their ideas for making the conference more interactive. With only a short collection time of 10 days, we received 135 answers from all continents, with 58% coming from European countries. The results and analysis of the Call for ideas can be found in this blog post.
Call for speakers
The next step was then to open the Call for speakers and contributions. This required us to summarise the conference theme and practical info for the speakers into a Speakers Guide. For the guide and form, we used the brilliant examples of other two conferences: Global service design conference, and Service design in government conference.
Tip: Having a good Speaker Guide can help you answer questions that potential speakers will have. It will also help you to describe what kind of event you are organising. This will help the speakers and their content to align with your vision.
Tip: Building a comprehensive yet easy-to-use form for speaker to apply will help you manage all the details in the selection process and later when you are building the conference programme materials. Do include everything you need for marketing the sessions and speakers, but do not overwhelm them — so that people feel a low barrier to apply.
See our Call for Speakers form here.
Review process
We received 85 applications for the conference programme. The form was open for one month. We were closing in the summer holiday period and had to figure out a way to go through all the applications, evaluate them and decide which sessions to include in the programme. We invited a panel of experts to join the review process. Due to the huge amount of applications, each reviewer only had half of the submissions to evaluate. Reviewers had independent time to read through the materials, note down comments and evaluate submissions based on a shared criteria.
Our review criteria was:
- aligment to theme
- relevant & valuable to audience
- clarity & quality
- interactive & engaging
The review panel would then meet and have a discussion about how well the sessions would complement each other and find a balance between high quality content and diversity of representation. Having sessions from different countries and continents was very important for us. In our shared session we quickly selected the top choices and then used the remaining time to discuss diversity and the sessions that had potential. At the end we mapped the sessions based on the conference main themes — futures and systems change, and started to identify themes for the sessions outside these main ones. We also had an idea that Day 1 should have more keynotes and case studies, while Day 2 should be more hands on and workshops.
Tip: In order to make sense of this huge mess of information, the most important tool is the programme time table. Arranging sessions, especially parallel ones, into a timetable will help you have the big picture and see if all the pieces fit. We used Miro for this and it helped because the pieces kept moving for weeks.
Tip: While it is important to have the criteria and an excel sheet to record the points, it is still best to trust the intuition of the experts and leave space for discussion. Having a diverse enough expert panel will help keep balance. Making the process more into a dialogue will keep the experience more engaging to the experts.
Tip: Having a process, criteria and review session for the selection is important, but in the end it will require someone to make the first draft of the programme timetable and arrange all the puzzle pieces. Reserve enough time for this.
About
Anni Leppänen was the Conference Chair for International Design in Government Conference 2024 in Helsinki. Other members of the conference management team included Eze Montenegro, Tuire Suihkonen ja Julia Isoniemi. Anni and Julia shared the programme leadership responsibilities.
We are super thankful to our amazing group of volunteers from different countries and organisations.
The conference was a part of the International Design in Government community.
