More than 40 years ago, Marshall McLuhan made his famous observation that "the medium is the message" - that how a message is conveyed affects its substance. We might coin a similar phrase for meetings and conventions: The format becomes the content. Digital and online media are changing the way people relate to information, to the point that what they learn is affected, and in some cases determined, by how they learn it. Nowhere is that more evident than at meetings and conventions - which, if a recent survey of Convene readers is any indication, are beginning to adopt a more flexible, fluid approach to creating and sharing content with attendees. Specifically, 36 percent of survey respondents said their organizations provide opportunities in their programs for attendees to shape their own content; nearly 40 percent make educational sessions available online after a meeting; more meeting professionals think online content increases meeting attendance as opposed to decreasing it (20 percent versus 15 percent); and various groups are using blogs (50 percent), podcasts (40 percent), virtual communities (36 percent), and other social media to encourage attendees to participate in meetings.

In other words, content is evolving from a top-down model to something more collaborative. Audience members post cell-phone videos of keynote addresses to YouTube for anyone to watch, critique, share, and edit. They text-message questions to presenters, mid-presentation. They blog, podcast, stream, and Twitter. They friend one another. They link in.

Are you right there with them? Are you offering "unconference" elements for them to craft their own learning opportunities? Growing your meeting into a year-round content machine? In the following pages, we explore how associations and other groups are successfully putting these notions into action, why meetings may well be one of the last bastions of freely shared ideas, and what the wild popularity of Wikipedia - the ultimate experiment in user-generated content - portends for the meetings industry.

The Power of UN
Meetings W/O Borders
Copy - Right & Copy - Wrong