PublicSpaces / Conference

Hybrid events

March 11 13:45 - 14:45

Language: Dutch.

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What are the best ways to organise online or partly online and offline or hybrid events? Monique van Dusseldorp did research for PublicSpaces on the essence of events and how to translate that online. Together with Monique, we look at several examples and explore with a number of organisations from the cultural and public field who else is also working on this.

Moderator

Leonieke Verhoog

Table guests

Recap

The most creative and cultural session of the PublicSpaces conference is this roundtable session and important to indicate that PublicSpaces is not only about the supply side, but also about the question: what do public cultural, media and heritage organisations actually need to reach their audience and how do they do that in these digital times?

All participants are working on it in some way:
Monique van Dusseldorp, compiler of events and conferences in the field of media and technology, among others on behalf of PublicSpaces, started a research project on hybrid events, which resulted in a widely read newsletter Future of Events.

Lilian Stolk runs The Hmm, a platform for internet culture and they experiment a lot with online event organising.

Marijn Bril works as a researcher and curator for the Institute of Networkcultures, among others, where she researched hybrid events by talking to different organisers, curators and developers and seeing what went well and what can still be learned.

Maaike Verberk is director of DEN, the knowledge institute for digital transformation in the cultural sector, and they see that culture houses are also looking for how they can start balancing their online and offline offerings when they will soon be allowed to reopen, and which hybrid model best fits that, and DEN supports the sector in this.

Wilja Jurg is managing director of Tetem, development institute in e-culture. Tetem has been working on the topic of hybridity for some time, as it is usually geographically at some distance from the audience they want to reach. Based in Enschede, Tetem has a regional function throughout Twente and explores how to design digitally with multiple people together and then how to create a community.

Johan Oomen works as Head of Research at the Institute for Sound and Vision and they have been experimenting a lot last year with offering festivals and programming online. They are also investigating how to archive all this new content. Every stage and debate centre is now also becoming a broadcaster, and since they are there for the broadcasters, they are also thinking about how to store all those great new formats.

Together with Natalie Dixon,Klasien van de Zandschulp runs Affect Lab, where they research and experiment with hybrid formats, among other things. One project of this is DistanceDisco, an online tool where you have to look for your dance partner, and they now also have plans to add a physical dance floor experience to it and really make it a hybrid format and create an intimate relationship between a physical audience and an online audience.

Take aways:

Hybrid events: generally, a hybrid event means something that happened in a particular location and online. Artists, musicians, speakers on a stage and participants via screens also on stage; how do you bring the online and offline worlds together?

What should those worlds coming together look like? Those online worlds are not yet fully developed. The platform also enforces a certain behaviour. What works well anyway is where people already are. So if your audience is on Twitch, organise something on Twitch. And of course, with PublicSpaces in mind as well, we want those to be public spaces. Only the spaces that most people understand, for example Zoom or Facebook, are often not public yet, but commercial spaces. So how those spaces are going to develop depends very much on whether the public itself is going to understand and find those public spaces and not just stick to the commercial ones. In one year, the whole world has been given a crash course in how to get together online, which is actually quite fascinating.

ITA live: 6 hours of theatre, live theatre with tickertape with news and tweets, live and news news news, lots of layers you were watching, which also had 1,000 people from all over the world watching. And events could learn something from that: we actually need a lot more layers where you can reflect and where you can deepen and meet.

Very small things sometimes also work very well: you are a viewer visiting a Japanese craftsman and with 30 people you look at that and ask questions, that is suddenly possible now.

More great examples and Monique van Dusseldorp's research can be found at https://futureofevents.substack.com/

Because of corona, Tetem has also immediately adapted the commissions to artists and started thinking about the physical visit, the visit people can make to the exhibition via a robot and the online visit, such as Playbour (Playing + Labour) where there are interactive online spaces in which physical events also take place, in which you can play bingo, meet people and have conversations. They will also provide education in it. And Tetem has a regional function for 14 Twente municipalities, livestream & chat connection with Tetem's lab. A community is forming there that is not so linked to the municipality, it's starting to transcend municipal boundaries a bit. Small-scale events can now be programmed because more people now participate. Community now also gets its own relationships and activities, without Tetem having to be the instigator every time.

So it is striking that many more people actually attend events now than when they were only organised physically. The area of interest is larger, but not everyone could always physically come to a particular location. For example, the Playground festival also had an event in a Twitch channel and they said, very cleverly, that it would not be recorded and you could only experience it live and 30,000 people ended up attending that. Dutch Dance Theatre also has that experience of reaching a much larger audience. The online audience that is normally the secondary audience is now the primary audience and that changes the tone and experience. Tetem also indicates that they now manage to reach children who never actually came to the arts centre before. They therefore hope that they will continue to reach them, even if physical meetings can be held again, and they will continue to create digital programming to reach this target group anyway.

What formats will remain if we are all vaccinated? Getting together online can also be a hangout, it doesn't have to be just an event, it can be year-round. It could always be done, but the realisation is now clearer that it can. Even though there is a gigantic hunger in everyone to get together physically again, of course, to see and meet people, and that experience side of events will therefore probably also become much stronger. And we now also know that distributed events are possible, that speakers do not always have to be physically in the room and that will also save a lot of travelling back and forth across the globe (hopefully). So digital provides scale, but digitalisation can also play a role on diversity and inclusivity.

The experience, the audience experience (online & offline) that still needs a lot of research. For the audience of the future, digital and offline are actually already mixed. As Monique described in her article on hybrid events that she was not allowed to participate in her son's Fortnite concert night, 'because he went with his friends' (even though they were all in their own dorm rooms). How do you engage in artistic storytelling offline and online, and how does that reinforce each other knowing that your audience of the future will find you primarily online?

The question then becomes how to shape the interaction between online and offline audiences. That is a super exciting field where Klasien is also experimenting with the Affectlab and DistanceDisco, to create an intimate dance experience between online or offline dancers. There is still a lot to explore and design. How do you enrich the experience of a birthday or a wedding, for example, if some of your guests are present online and some physically, what forms are already possible for that? This is an exciting field.

In her research, Marijn Bril looks at three different things: the metaphors we use to explain those online events, the strategies involved and the experiences of the audience itself. We look for new words for those new experiences and new storylines. 'We are travelling here now' is something you sometimes hear in an online conversation. And it helps to be able to be more imaginative, to imagine bigger about those new interactions. Beyond the words, it is also the design of a platform that is essential how the experience feels. Like Hopin, which we are speaking in now, there the session opens 5 minutes in advance, so they see it as a timeline. But for visitors, it's also a place to be, to arrive for a while. You could design that very differently, the spatiality. The metaphors help with how you want to design the experience, the spaces, the timeline and also in the pre-track and post-track where you warm up your audience for your event, there's a lot to explore there too.

At The Hmm, they also think about that reception and that customer journey that the visitor travels. They look at different platforms and what atmosphere it brings to the event. In their first event in quarantine about that went into YouTube, Zoom, Jitsi and they discovered that if you have to log in that the chat is much less active. So they created their own livestream platform in which it is as accessible and approachable as possible, where people are warmly welcomed. In the platform, they have also included in the design the values they consider important: their own server, their own streaming service, Max streaming, which they also pay for. Of course, you could also use a free streaming service like YouTube, but then you still pay for it in a different way with your data. They developed it with Hackers & Designers and the livestream platform is available for people to use via Github, the code is public.

Interesting dynamic to explore from physical events to how you design that online: chance encounters and also awkward moments are characteristic of meetings and how does that translate to an online event? For example, you accidentally step into the wrong room or your microphone is not switched on online, which are the things you remember most and where meetings arise. Or for example, who you are going to talk to, usually you start with someone you already know and then there is someone next to them you get to know. This is also translated online by, for instance, the Networking button here in Hopin, a karaoke button in OhYay, a Whisper button where you hear murmurs and you meet people.

An event is not television, not a broadcast and people are watching obediently, it actually works much better if you actually start making something together, doing something. Iskander Smit notes this via chat: 'At ThingsCon a few times we did maker sessions where the participants' own space where you are making something comes together in the online space. Works well, as participants very engaged.'

Ilse Keune asks a question via chat: Which platforms meet the principles of PublicSpaces? 'Hopin is not necessarily a good platform in terms of the values of PublicSpaces, but it is a platform that we know from the experience of Pakhuis de Zwijger that it works to get together with around 250 people at a time and connect their multi-camera directing system to it. Johan Oomen of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, who is also a PublicSpaces partner and board member, adds that as a coalition we are already working on how to deal with this for our partners with open source alternatives. You have to be where your audience is, and by using these open source alternatives with several public organisations, we hope to be able to reach that critical mass, which in turn will bring more people into contact with it. From the point of view of Sound and Vision, it is interesting whether the material that such an event produces can also be preserved and reused under a Creative Commons licence. We will investigate this further in the coming months. Incidentally, it is also a good idea to enter into discussion with the various platforms themselves, which are sometimes willing to make adjustments.

From PublicSpaces, we also want to map and value the platforms and include other organisations and networks that are already doing this. Look for example at https://pirate-x.com/eventtech-directory/ or https://ethical.net/resources/ or https://publicmediastack.com/ and spokespeople of these networks also spoke in track 2 of the conference, check that back here in Mapping the ecosystem.

Maaike Verberk of DEN also indicates that there should also be joint dreaming about what digital and hybrid coming together can look like, then it is also good to think about a joint platform, develop new business models and also ensure that a lot of public comes to one platform, in collaboration with each other, with media partners, government and the sector itself, where the larger institutions also help the smaller ones. Tetem does the same, helping those smaller organisations, with their streaming studio and artists trained as stream facilitators, create content together, for example, with library associations. They make the partnerships big enough that they can also achieve the volume and standards they want and experiment and innovate together.

Practical questions from the audience:

Ronald Huizer: Question: what does this kind of online event require from staff who have to (may!) organise/facilitate it?

Maaike Verberk: Ronald Huizer relevant question: it requires different skills than are often present now. Think of rehearsal rooms being converted into film studios and and theatre directors now working very closely with travel directors for TV.

Jarl Schulp: Best panel: we, FIBER, organised a hybrid event last Sept with onsite audiences & offsite audiences and on/offsite speakers. What struck us was that we had to design our marketing & communications completely differently due to different contexts. How did you guys experience that?

Organising online events takes a lot more time: moderator for the event, and an extra person for the chat. It also requires more time in preparation. Normally you use the standard reception options of a physical location: bar, cloakroom, welcome by someone, briefing speakers and extra technical tests beforehand, and online you have to design and prepare all that yourself.

Heleen Rouw adds: How do you bring your knowledge to the other cultural institutions is an important point. And especially how do you ensure that internal culture of those organisations transforms, team members are coached to make programming for online their own?

Pepijn Lemmens: What about cost/benefit, (how much) are visitors willing to pay for an online event vs a physical event? And how does that relate to cost?

Jarl Schulp: Pepijn Lemmens This is a big question I think indeed. The investment is high for a hybrid event, but this does not translate directly to online. Much is offered open/free online (music, content, conference)

Monique van Dusseldorp: nowadays, a lot of tickets are also sold for online events!

Klasien van de Zandschulp: Definitely!

Pepijn Lemmens: I have the impression that the willingness to pay for online is lower than for physical, while the costs are not proportionally lower. What is your experience with that?

Johan Oomen: You can sell endless tickets for online events. Jarl Schulp: Monique van Dusseldorp Sure, I know this, I express myself wrongly. I mean more that there is so much on offer, for free or almost nothing. That ticket costs are still much low for events compared to the investment to be made. Online culture has become 'free' in recent years anyway. Matching investment/cost is still a challenge

Monique van Dusseldorp: Di-rect performed online for the sixth time yesterday, selling more than 13,000 tickets yesterday alone. Micha Wertheim sold per hall tickets for his show, 2,900 for his performance at the Kleine Komedie. DNT and ITA also do thousands of tickets per performance.

Jarl Schulp: Monique van Dusseldorp Yes that is nice to see indeed

Iskander Smit: Monique van Dusseldorp it's becoming so popular and lucrative that we don't need to go back to offline events. Just like ghost restaurants soon ghost theatres :-)

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Want to know more about the explorations made by the speakers on this panel?

Monique van Dusseldorp: my newsletter https://futureofevents.substack.com/ & interest in experiment precisely on a smaller level, platforms, forms in which we meet, from listening to records together via twitter, via clubhouse or cooking together online, that's what I want to learn from.

Maaike Verberk: DEN newsletter https://www.den.nl/actueel/nieuwsbrieven & helping institutions find balance between online and offline

Lilian Stolk: on 31 March we are organising, together with Public Spaces, a virtual tour of alternative platforms (e.g. a presentation in NextCloud or Ethercalc) https://thehmm.nl/event/the-hmm-on-alternative-platforms/ & interest in how hybrid forms are really being further developed

Wilja Jurg: https://tetem.nl/event/i-want-to-delete-it-all-but-not-now/ is the hybrid Escaperoom opening this weekend. Work of Roos Groothuizen & interest in sharing knowledge with other organisation and experimenting with creators and sees tasking towards the public to also keep the online model for those people who were not so easy to reach before.

Klasien van de Zandschulp: www.distancedisco.nl & interest to continue talking about encounters between online and offline audiences

Cathy Brickwood: At The New Institute we are also working on our own platform, more soon!

Marijn Bril: follow Marijn's work here https://networkcultures.org/goingonline/author/marijnbril/ & interested in exploring how to find your way as an organisati now in that new hybrid way of working.

Johan Oomen: also finds it a special time to experiment, feels like early days on the internet and would like to share knowledge and experience on this.