“M.LOVE” – what a strange and odd name I thought when I first heard about it. “It” was supposed to be a kind of conference – at least that was what I got listening to people who were involved with M.LOVE. A kind of TED for Mobile…
This actually already shows the first mystery and magic of the Confestival M.LOVE and also explains a piece of the success story of the brand M.LOVE. Their approach
- make people interested by not telling the full story
- design & communicate that the event is different
- approach & engage “network hub” people
- target your audience and motivate people to share willingly
- make people feel important
Based on that very simple rules, Harald Neidhardt (@hneidhardt), Peter Giblin (@petegiblin), Jonathan MacDonald (@jmacdonald) and the whole international team managed to create a full 3-day community event in the middle of nowhere (50 km from Halle/Saale, Germany) that was extraordinary and incredibly inspiring for everyone who participated.. Of course, there were many more factors, like the excellent speeches, great organisation and the ancient castle which added to the ambiance to influence the outcome. But the most impressive observation was the different approach for this event.
What you usually get when you are participating at a mobile or digital industry event is that there are some interesting speeches– most of them product or company pitches, and 95% of the people at the event are consuming without participating. At M.LOVE, it was the opposite. I actually had the feeling that everybody was sharing all the time. This behavior was the motivation for generating the most inspiring discussions in which I participated for as long as I can remember.
So what were my takeaways? This is very hard to describe and even harder to capture in words. Lucky for me, there were many excellent writers/participants sharing their thoughts, and, as a bonus, M.LOVE invited Heather Williems from Imagethink, who was also creatively live-capturing this year’s SXSW conference keynotes in Austin, Texas. Please see the links below for more details about the speeches, sessions and personal interpretations of several attendees:
▪ Imagethink’s Heather Williems’ Flickr set of all speeches
▪ Jonathan MacDonald’s Future Cube video
▪ Heike Scholz (Mobilezeitgeist) (in German)
By reading and watching the above mentioned links you can tell the participants were not only mobile industry people, but also people that have great stories to share — opening up minds. The spectrum of attendees and topics ranging from Microsoft’s Office Future Vision to design and science history, mobile needs in Bangladesh, to the two lovely musicians Rocky and Balls who are well-known Youtube-artists in the UK. But the most important things happened “in between” when all these highly-engaged people started chatting about changing the world simply by having a discussion. These were the moments that allowed for the most valuable take aways.
My conclusion? Try to be there the next time. My assumption is that “spreading the word” will lead to at least one other approach for M.LOVE, and the demand for tickets will be higher then the seats. The level of inspirationand innovative thinking is valuable and necessary for everyone who wants to make the world a better place.
Finally, to clue you into what happened there, I invite you to watch a video, shown on the second night on the huge walls inside the castle, of the giant, 3D digitalised projection art… Projektil, the specialized company from Switzerland, showed this awesome augmented reality and gave a glimpse into what might happen with our senses in the future. Enjoy.
mlove show from PROJEKTIL on Vimeo.
