From multi-venue conferences to hybrid events: designing for real event complexity
Buildings, floors, rooms, stages, breakouts, exhibition areas and online spaces. Real events are shaped like estates, and a flat list of room names cannot hold them.
The flat list problem
Most event tools model location as a text field. You type "Hall 2" and the software stores the characters H, a, l, l, space, 2.
This works until the event is real. Then "Hall 2" and "Hall Two" and "hall 2" are three different rooms. A session in "Main Stage" and a session in "Main Hall" cannot be detected as a clash, because as far as the system is concerned they are unrelated strings. And nothing can answer the question that actually matters on the day: how long does it take to walk from here to there?
Modelling the real estate
Venues are not lists. They are trees, and everyone who works in them already thinks in that shape.
A convention centre contains levels. A level contains halls and breakout rooms. A hall contains a main stage and, during the expo, a secondary theatre in the corner. A university campus contains buildings which contain floors which contain lecture theatres. This is not an abstraction imposed on the venue — it is how the venue’s own floor plan is drawn and how its staff give directions.
- Venue
- The site. A conference centre, a campus, an arena, a church.
- Building and floor
- Where the walk between two rooms stops being trivial.
- Room
- The bookable space, with a capacity and a turnaround time.
- Stage or area
- A room can hold more than one. An expo hall routinely holds three.
- Online space
- A stream, a breakout, a platform room. A place, with a capacity and an audience.
Online spaces are places too
The hybrid years taught the industry a lot of hard lessons, and the one that stuck for me is that treating the stream as a broadcast of the event rather than a place within it produces a worse event for everyone.
An online room has a capacity, a schedule, an audience who chose it over something else, and a set of production requirements as specific as any physical stage. Model it as a location and the agenda, the showflow and the portal all handle it correctly without special cases.
Turnarounds and capacity
Two properties of a room do more scheduling damage than everything else combined, and both are invisible in a flat list.
Turnaround is how long it takes to make the room ready for the next thing — reset the chairs, change the set, clear four hundred people out and let four hundred more in. Schedule back-to-back sessions in a room with a fifteen-minute turnaround and you have not made an efficient programme, you have made a late one.
Capacity is the other. A popular breakout in the small room is a queue in a corridor, and a queue in a corridor is a fire officer’s problem before it is a programming one.
The same place, four audiences
Once the estate is modelled, a location renders differently for each person who needs it, from one record.
An attendee needs "Hall 2, Level 0 — four minutes from here". A speaker needs "Main Stage, enter stage left, steps are on your right". Production needs the room’s technical spec and its turnaround. Signage needs what is in this room next. Same place, four correct answers.
Plan the event. Publish the programme. Run the show.
One event spine, many views. Build the programme once, then give every person the right live view of it.