Has the World of Conferences Changed Forever?

Has the world of conferences changed forever? We asked Ingeborg Bosch. She has been working at Heliview for over eight years as a producer of various IT conferences.

For several years now, she has been responsible for the conferences Heliview organizes in Belgium. During the corona pandemic, Heliview worked hard on a new concept for its conferences; a hybrid concept that fits better in the zeitgeist of post-corona.

“Over the past two years, we have learned a lot about working from home and how we organize our working days. Motivation for attending an in-person conference day is also different from that before the corona pandemic, according to research among (former) participants of our conferences. People have a lot of choices in conferences and agendas are much fuller than before. Attending a conference is less obvious.”

Heliview’s research showes that when attending a conference, there is a particular need for networking and learning from peers. This applies to participating in a conference day and participating in an online conference. Instead of inactively listening to a speaker, they want more interaction. “That’s why we schedule more roundtables during the conference day, but also online we organise these interactive sessions. We continue to think about how we can interact more. We are also really open to ideas from the participants. That is why I am making an appeal in this newsletter: feel free to send me an e-mail if you have good ideas and examples of a valuable conference. We do not organize these conferences for ourselves, but for our partners and participants and are happy to listen to them. So feel free to send me an e-mail to share you ideas.