{
  "gathering_ready_version": "0.1",
  "name": "United We Transform: the big test, 15 experiments in one day",
  "edition_year": 2024,
  "dates": {
    "start": "2024-05-21",
    "end": "2024-05-21"
  },
  "format": "in_person",
  "organizer": {
    "name": "United We Transform",
    "url": "https://unitedwetransform.com/",
    "contact": "corrections@unitedwetransform.com"
  },
  "url": "https://unitedwetransform.com/history/",
  "note": "This is the organizer's own file, published so the group that wrote the GatherReady standard also implements it. Sessions are listed in the order they ran, with durations rather than clock times, because the original public record documents the fifteen experiments and their results but not a minute-by-minute schedule. Nothing here is reconstructed beyond what was published at the two artifact URLs below.",
  "sessions": [
    {
      "title": "Arrival: no registration table (Experiment 4)",
      "duration": 60,
      "format": "other",
      "purpose": "Get roughly a thousand people into the room without a queue, using signage and self-directed check-in instead of a desk, so the first minutes are spent meeting people rather than waiting in line."
    },
    {
      "title": "New name tag format (Experiment 1)",
      "duration": 30,
      "format": "other",
      "purpose": "Make each participant legible to strangers on something other than job title, so the opening conversation starts from a shared interest instead of a rank."
    },
    {
      "title": "The no-agenda agenda (Experiment 12)",
      "duration": 30,
      "format": "other",
      "purpose": "Open by teaching the room how to move through the day rather than reading a schedule at it, so participants can choose where they are useful."
    },
    {
      "title": "Assignments instead of talks (Experiment 5)",
      "duration": 90,
      "format": "workshop",
      "purpose": "Put the whole room to work on the same question at the same time and produce written output that outlives the day, instead of listening to a speaker."
    },
    {
      "title": "Panels, reinvented (Experiment 7)",
      "duration": 90,
      "format": "panel",
      "purpose": "Let experts work a real problem in front of the room and then split into participant-chosen groups, so expertise reaches the people who came with that problem."
    },
    {
      "title": "Reinventing networking (Experiment 14)",
      "duration": 90,
      "format": "networking",
      "purpose": "Replace chance encounters with deliberate AI-suggested introductions, and record every interaction so the quality of the matches could be checked afterward instead of assumed."
    },
    {
      "title": "No rows of chairs, no stage (Experiment 11)",
      "duration": 120,
      "format": "workshop",
      "purpose": "Regroup the room repeatedly without furniture as the constraint, so a thousand people can reorganize in under a minute and nobody spends the day as an audience member."
    },
    {
      "title": "Close: what each person does next",
      "duration": 60,
      "format": "other",
      "purpose": "Collect the commitments and the session outputs while the room is still together, and hand them to the team responsible for publishing the results."
    }
  ],
  "stated_outcomes": [
    "Run fifteen live experiments on gathering design in a single day and publish the result of every one of them, including the ones that failed.",
    "Record the interaction data of a thousand-person room in enough detail that claims about the day can be checked rather than asserted.",
    "Produce a public account of what worked and what did not, usable by any organizer designing a gathering of more than twenty-five people."
  ],
  "commitments": {
    "captured": true,
    "owner_role": "Program lead, United We Transform",
    "follow_up_at": "2024-07-01",
    "method": "Session outputs and the full record of networking interactions were collected on the day and published as a public learnings deck, rather than kept as an internal debrief."
  },
  "artifacts": [
    {
      "title": "The fifteen experiments: what worked and what did not",
      "url": "https://unitedwetransform.com/history/",
      "published": "2024-07-01"
    },
    {
      "title": "United We Transform learnings, the full deck",
      "url": "https://learnings.unitedwetransform.com/",
      "published": "2024-07-01"
    }
  ],
  "evaluation": {
    "url": "https://unitedwetransform.com/what-is-ges/",
    "note": "United We Transform publishes the Gathering Effectiveness Score and so does not score its own event. The published record of the day, including the misses: 1,245 registered against roughly a thousand in the room, 7,545 networking interactions recorded, only 48 percent of the AI networking recommendations rated positive by the people who received them, the tooling buckling at around 500 simultaneous users, and up to 40 percent of participants reporting confusion at points during the day."
  }
}