CYO2011? It was great, now let’s do it better!

Posted on | August 5, 2011 | No Comments

Create Your Own 2011 was our first event on co-creation, personalization and mass customization and took place on May 30-31 at Planet Modulor in Berlin. #cyo2011 consisted of a conference with a long list of speakers and audience of ca. 220, an exhibition with over 30 exhibitors and a workshop with 40 participants. The documentation material we have produced includes speaker presentations, photos, and videos: www.cyo2011.com/documentation

Who’s our audience?

If the mix of people who attended the event in may is anything to go by, the Create Your Own community is diverse. An interesting mix of CEOs of multinational companies and angel investors who are putting money into mass customization, academics who are interested in co-creation and the empowered/enlightened/active consumer, entrepreneurs and artists who are breaking new ground as well as people from various maker- and hardware hacking movements.

Why participate in future events?

The objectives of this first event where mixed and at times contradictory due to there being a lot of different organizations with different priorities involved in designing and making decisions about it. In spite of this we still managed to achieve most of what we set out to do, and in record time.  A summary of our objectives for the event in May:

  1. Participants would gain new knowledge both and about the future of how things and services are being conceived, produced and sold as well as become part of a network of individuals and organizations who are leading the way.
  2. Participants would train their brains thinking and collaborating with others in order to come up with innovative solutions to common challenges.
  3. The knowledge present during the event would generate new insights that would then be disseminated, in the form of content produced by the organizers, through the people who had attended it.
  4. For future events I would like to add a fourth one to the list: The exhibition would draw a large volume of potential end users for the commercial exhibitors

The general feedback from CYO2011 was very positive overall. There were some points of criticism, some anticipated in advance e.g. that the conference program did not allow for enough interaction between participants and that it would have been better to spread it out over two days instead of one. Also, there were some points of irritation over practical issues related to the catering and venue (e.g. toilets breaking down and the exhibition space being too small with little space in between exhibitor booths.), although most people seemed to like the “rough”, “construction site” feel and DIY esthetic of CYO2011. We got a lot of positive feedback about it being different, having attracted a diverse mix of people, and “not boring like these events usually are”.

What’s left to do?

We need to spread the documentation from the event bundled in calls to action (sharing, feedback, participation in organizing next year’s event or funding): 10 great videos and blogposts released over 10 weeks. In parallel we will be putting together summaries of the MC for Makers sessions with the Facilitators and participants- and posting them online over a month in order to get people engaged. If we get traction we might then announce producing a booklet project.

This is quite alot of work a but we feel the project is not complete unless we do it – a successful event is one that spreads knowledge and generates conversations beyond the days of the actual meeting.

How we envision CYO2012

2-day event during event which draws a large crowd of would be end users

  • > 250 paying visitors to the conference
  • > 50 paying exhibitors, at 250 Euros per exhibitor package. Exhibitors selected based on appeal to general audience.
  • > 1000 visitors to the exhibition
  • >  80 participants in workshops
  • > 500 downloads of engineering & design package
  • Budget for promoting and marketing before the event
  • Budget for documentation and dissemination of produced material after the event

If you want to get involved in helping us make 2012 happen, please contact and we’ll add you on the mailing list where we will call for help with specific tasks throughout this year: nadia@cookiesncode.com

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