The Summit

The Raleigh Innovation Summit is an effort to engage the Raleigh community in developing a hub of innovation downtown Raleigh.

The layout of the summit is as follows:

The event will start with lunch and feature two keynote speakers. Four break-out sessions will be held on the above topics, and innovative technologies will be used to capture and present information to attendees. A Suits + Geeks Mixer will follow, allowing attendees and entrepreneurs from the community to network.

Reflection

Visualizing conversation requires a keen ear and diligent concentration. The documentation of the conversation was beneficial for those presenting the groups discussion to the rest of the conference attendees. Developing a recap of the conversation was manageable due to the ability to navigate at different scales. Furthermore, being able to hide and then reveal the detailed branches allowed for a quick overview to be navigated and then specific portions of the visualization to reveal more details when desired.

The projection of the MindNode visualization seemed distracting for the workshop participants. If the visualization was referred to during the group discussion, I believe the participants would be able to follow the process. Instead, the visualization was only referenced at the beginning and the end of the conversation. This prevented the projection to be a resources or tool for discussion or insight.

At future events, the visualization could reveal the questions and topics that are dominating the conversation. This guidance could push the group, dynamically, to expand the reach of the conversation. This may partially be due to the limitation of the tool itself. I was forced to remain ‘zoomed-in’ to the visualization so that participants could read the notes. Though at times I ‘zoomed-out’ to show an overview, the information became so tiny, it proved irrelevant. If the moderators had the time to stop the conversation intermittently to review the visualization, this issue of following the larger landscape of the conversation may be resolved.

After the workshop, we presented the visualizations to the entire conference. There was one workshop participant that presented their on key topics from the workshop while the visualization team (four fellow graduate students) followed the presentation in the MindNode document.

The opportunity to be apart of the conference was an honor and proved a positive networking opportunity along with the experience with new the tools used to document workshop discussion. New Kind provided me a the opportunity to assist the development of Raleigh’s innovation community which I hope to become more involved.