As she watched organizations continue to transition their events from live to virtual, Liz Lathan, CEO of Austin, Texas-based Haute Dokimazo, noticed the increasing importance of creating real human connection and conversation within a digital platform. From there, the Age of Conversation Summit was born. 

Scheduled to take place on Sept. 9 with a registration fee of $20, the summit will include tracks like Shift Happens, the Woowoo Room, Unicorns & Rainbows, Dial-Up Disco and Central Perk. While playfully named, these tracks will build conversations focusing on addressing real problems, providing solutions and sending attendees away with actionable content. 

“This is a space for training, development, personal and professional growth — and that belly-aching laugh only an old-school phone call can bring,” says Lathan.

Most importantly, according to Lathan, the event will be crafted, created and produced by a group of event professionals seeking to gain experience in virtual events to apply it to current and future roles. “The ‘career incubator’ angle was a key motivation behind creating the event,” says Lathan.

Below, Lathan discusses what event professionals can expect from the event.

Why is the Age of Conversation Summit relevant now?

After months of consuming the majority of our content online, people are eager to connect with others in a meaningful way. The meetings industry is also bracing for virtual-only events for at least the next six months, but not supporting the growth and development of event professionals to be both prepared for and have the experience in creating virtual events.

We created this event as a way to:

• Promote the value of adding conversation into your virtual event portfolio.
• Provide the opportunity for those professionals who need more experience in creating a virtual event.
• Document the process from the inception to the execution of a virtual event to illustrate how much time and how many resources it takes to do it well.
• Experiment with ideas in a way that can’t be done first at a client or brand event.

How did conversations become the focus? 

With the formats for hosting and attending events currently only fitting into the confines of a screen, we felt something missing — like the hallway chats with those you haven't seen since the last event or that long-overdue “it's so good to see you again” hug. So the idea is that every single piece of content we share must be a conversation or make conversations better or facilitate conversations or provide personal development through conversations (resume coaching, etc).

In what ways does this event differ from others by Haute Dokimazo?

While there will be a Haute Dokimazo Spontaneous Think Tank during this event, the only similarity is that we are leading with our five Cs of Haute Dokimazo: care, co-create, collaborate, converse and connect. The rest will be conversation-based content aligning to the identified needs. This larger scale experience will allow us to push our experimental ideas even further and test them for ourselves and for others.

What do you hope attendees will take away from the summit?

As with all Haute Dokimazo projects, we hope to inject our love of life, fun and energy into this experience. We hope to bring a ray of sunshine into our participants’ lives that they can carry forward into their events. And, hopefully, at the end we’ll have a master list of best practices to share with the world.

Learn more about the Age of Information Summit here.