Forget Engagement at Events. Participation Is the Real Infrastructure.
The real future of events isn’t content or spectacle. It’s what happens when the room takes control.
Participation is the lifeblood of gatherings. It is the raised hand in the ancient marketplace, the roar of the Coliseum, the voice carried by a microphone, the sticky note on a wall. It is not decoration; it is the oldest and most powerful technology humans possess. Without it, events are theater. With it, they become engines of memory, connection, and change.
That is why this October I will be on stage at IMEX America for a session titled Technology and the Power of Participation. The conversation will be guided by Robin Raskin, a pioneering tech journalist and the founder of The Virtual Events Group, who has spent decades at the intersection of media and innovation. Joining me will be CJ Davis, CTO of The Famous Group, a creative technologist behind some of the most spectacular fan experiences in sports, and Sherry Huss, Head of Community at Freeman, the company that is also sponsoring the session — fittingly so, since Freeman literally builds the scaffolding of live gatherings.
But if we’re going to sit in Las Vegas and talk about participation, it cannot just be about apps, clickers, or feedback surveys. Participation has a lineage stretching back millennia, a science rooted in the chemistry of human connection, and a future that could redefine how we solve problems as a species.
Two thousand years ago, the Roman Coliseum was already a participation engine. Fifty thousand people pressed into an oval of stone, their voices cascading into verdicts. A thumb raised or turned was not a metaphor; it was an interface. The tiers, the acoustics, the ritual — it was an algorithm in marble. From the Athenian agora to town halls in New England, from call-and-response in churches to protests in the streets, participation has always been about more than being present. It’s about shaping what happens. Neuroscience confirms what orators always sensed: synchrony — moving, singing, chanting together — aligns brain rhythms, floods us with oxytocin and dopamine, and forges belonging. Participation is not soft. It is science.
Technology didn’t invent participation, but it amplified it. The microphone was as transformative as the printing press. Suddenly one voice could reach thousands, and just as quickly, power shifted to those who held the mic. The roving microphone, the Q&A line, the applause meter — all were architectures of inclusion and exclusion. Every emoji surge in a livestream, every “raise hand” in an app, is simply a digital descendant of that invention.
Formats became technologies of their own. The Jeffersonian dinner enforces one table, one conversation, candor as currency. The World Café braids rotating small-group conversations into collective harvests. Open Space Technology hands the agenda to the participants. And then came the unconference, radical in its trust: no pre-scripted program, only a blank grid of time and space filled by participants themselves. It was democracy in Post-it notes and footsteps, proving that people will contribute if you give them ownership.
Some organizers pushed participation into theater. C2 Montréal hoisted executives into the air to see how fear changed dialogue. Radha Agrawal’s Daybreaker, when forced online, let thousands co-create dances and even songs. Each experiment revealed the same principle: change the context, and you change the conversation.
What began as a secret sunrise rave in Union Square grew into a global community that meets at dawn to dance, sweat, and connect — no alcohol, just endorphins and collective joy. When the pandemic shut down physical gatherings, Daybreaker moved online and discovered an even deeper layer of participation. Thousands of people didn’t just tune in to watch; they co-created. They voted on themes, choreographed moves, and even helped build original songs together. Dancing itself became a form of authorship — a participatory act that blurred the line between performer and audience.
Daybreaker’s story illustrates a truth that stretches from the Coliseum to C2’s dangling chairs: change the context and you change the conversation. Create space for movement, vulnerability, or play, and people will step into it — not as passive attendees, but as participants writing the experience together.
But participation doesn’t happen automatically. People weigh the risks and rewards of speaking up. Social Exchange Theory makes the calculus clear: the costs are embarrassment, rejection, wasted effort; the rewards are recognition, belonging, influence, opportunity. People step forward when the payoff is worth the risk. That’s why design matters. A microphone at the back lowers barriers. Anonymous polling reduces fear of judgment. Sticky notes that get clustered and displayed prove that input didn’t vanish into the void. Acknowledgement itself is a neurochemical incentive — dopamine fires when the group shows you matter.
And yet, participation often fails. Too many conferences are built less for conversation and more for commerce — gatherings staged so sponsors can pay for the room. The outcomes, the ideas, the sparks of new thinking? They vanish. No record, no continuity, no intellectual residue. It’s the biggest con: convening without courage.
At BizBash, I grew so frustrated that I borrowed a ritual from my time observing the State Department. Diplomats rarely leave without a communiqué, some form of Memo of Understanding. Why shouldn't conferences? We began closing with written memos that captured what participants said, agreed upon, and needed to carry forward. It was imperfect, but it created continuity — a tangible trace of participation that lived beyond the meeting rooms. And when participation was designed for depth, the effects multiplied. Out of some Jeffersonian dinners came entire communities. In New York, one dinner, held in the 21 Club wine cellar, of legal planners became the city’s first Legal Event Planners Association. Real participation doesn’t just fill a room; it creates more rooms. Fake participation dies where it starts.
Now the Coliseum’s stone logic has been recoded in algorithms. Digital twins simulate how crowds will flow before the first badge prints: where bottlenecks form, where serendipity sparks. Floor-plan models choreograph collisions. Hosted-buyer programs and matchmaking platforms — from crude diaries in the 1990s to AI engines like Grip, Brella, and Swapcard — do the same interpersonally, curating who you meet and when. Participation is no longer left to chance; it is engineered.
AI is changing what happens after. Hundreds of sticky notes can be clustered into themes in seconds. Thousands of chat comments can be distilled into insight. Foldit showed that distributed gamers could solve protein puzzles that stumped scientists. Ireland’s citizens’ assembly showed that structured participation could break political deadlock. Imagine scaling that inside events: a climate summit where fifty thousand voices are instantly mapped into consensus; a Jeffersonian dinner stretched across continents. Participation stops being anecdote and becomes intelligence.
That is the science of why it works. Participation is synchrony, chemistry, and exchange. It is democracy in miniature, encoded in gestures as old as the raised hand and as new as the predictive seating chart. And it is the most scalable technology we have for solving problems larger than any one mind.
I no longer judge events by headcount. The true metric is how many conversations are curated, how many ideas are sparked, how many leave the room alive. From the agora to the Coliseum, from coffeehouses to unconferences, from microphones to digital twins, the principle hasn’t changed: participation is humanity’s oldest technology. What’s different now is that we finally have the science to explain it — and the tools to make it global.
This October at IMEX America, that’s the story I’ll tell. Robin Raskin will press the questions, CJ Davis will bring the spectacle of fan technology, Sherry Huss will remind us that participation is community, and Freeman, our sponsor, will underscore that scaffolding matters. But the power has never belonged to the stage. It has always belonged to the room.