In the past months I have been helping out shaping the line-up and program of the upcoming PKM Summit (22 and 23 March in Utrecht, Netherlands). It is going to be a fun event, and there’s a wide range of interesting people scheduled to participate and speak. I had several reasons to get involved with this event.

The first was that in the current wave of popular tools for note making and personal knowledge management it is often overlooked that personal knowledge management and its methods and tools have a much richer background and history than just the current batch of highly visible tools being touted.
I also wanted to make sure that the event didn’t just have a productivity vibe, as personal knowledge management is so much more than getting more stuff done in less time, if it is about such things at all. I wanted the fun of learning and exploring, and combining that into new ideas and thoughts to be much more central, the creativity of knowledge work.

In terms of participants and speakers I wanted to help the event steer away from a merely anglo-saxon perspective (where productivity is often a dominant narrative) by bringing in people from across Europe.

And I wanted to help the event have an equal distribution of invited speakers between women and men. In that I failed.

I have experience with organising and hosting large scale European events (200-400 people) both here in the Netherlands and in places I had no local contacts to begin with. I’ve done all kinds of events both with and without budgets. I’ve learned that generally men will accept a speaking invitation, just because it sounds like fun whether or not it is squarely focused on their experience and expertise, and that in contrast women will accept speaking invitations more hesitantly if it is not fully aligned with their experience and expertise. I’ve learned to aim to invite women and men in a 2:1 ratio at least, and invite women first (so that speaking slots are not already taken because someone else just said yes right away), in order to achieve a balanced line-up.

My initial round through my network for this event was promising enough, but it turned out to be harder than expected for me to triangulate from there to a wider group of potential speakers. Such triangulation usually consists of asking people I talk to about the event for their own suggestions, and searching on relevant terms and see who is interacting around these topics (on the open web), see who they follow and reference etc. This time that yielded many 50-something men like myself. I don’t know whether that is because PKM itself is a niche with a very lopsided profile, whether it is that my perspective of PKM is actually lopsided or outdated and I simply don’t know where the real action on these topics is and bears names other than PKM, or that the action is taking place in more enclosed circles, or all of them or something else. I do know I feel like my efforts were not effective. The current schedule lists 6 women (30%) and 14 men (70%) as speakers.

It still is a promising event though, so if you care about deliberate practices around personal learning, do attend.