EVENTS ARE BACK NOW WHAT?

Go on a little journey with me, from my childhood as a hypochondriac through pandemic. It's a short trip and there are lots of photos along the way.

CHRISTOPHER, YOU'RE NOT GOING TO DIE.

I'm a hypochondriac, at least that's what my mother told me on the first day of kindergarten when I told her I was dying of gout after hearing about it from my grandmother in 1974.

For better or worse, and usually worse, I have battled with what I and many call "Health Anxiety" for the better part of my 53 years.

Maybe it's the root to my restless pursuit to document, understand and analysis my life? Perhaps, I'm bored and need something to worry about, either way, health anxiety has been debilitating at time and a good way of showing vulnerability at others.

PARANOIA AS A SERVICE

Fast forward to fall 2019, something seems different in the world, I'm not sure what it is. I start ordering wipes, masks and filters for my home.

January 2020, I notice strange rumbling on Reddit about the flu in China. The group is growing faster than any other community I have witnessed on Reddit.

Instantly I start looking for information in real-time on?Twitter. First stop, a crowd collaborative spreadsheet documenting cases. I know a thing or two about crowd-sourced patient care after living through HIV 1988-1993 and my own documented health journey.

Next, I jump over and start reading updates from The?World Health Organization. Things seem "managed," but I've heard that before when I read about "Gay Cancer" in a single city in the early 80s.

Slowly but surely, online health items start selling out by?late January 2020, long before toilet wars of spring 2020, vaccine debates, or politics.

None of this matters; I'm in Europe, speaking in Russia, Switzerland, and Germany. I'm doing what I do best, informing people about how the future has come and gone. The best we can do is manage our day-to-day personal data and connections.

February 1, 2020, I'm vigilant. I'm moving away from people; I'm wearing gloves, masks and wiping everything I touch down.

February 2020.?Everything I'm seeing is a reminder of how people will look at data and information trends and just ignore them.?

I start to remember how AIDS took hold and ruined my life. Stole my friends and buried my lover. ?

Instantly, it's 1989; I'm building networks of people to track, support, and treat HIV. There was no test for, no drugs for, and indeed until this day, over 40 years later, no vaccine for my first plauge.?

NO EVENTS

80% of my professional income,?well into the mid-six figures, comes from speaking, consulting, and content creation for some of the biggest brands in the world.?

From Bayer to Google, you're probably using a lot of the Technology I have inspired and helped bring to the world.

Yet, from March of 2020 until recently, my income was destroyed like so many others.?

During this time, I did what I always do when faced with a crisis of data and mismanagement; I used my hyper-anticipatory and got busy building solutions to help myself and my community.

I had to fill the void with projects that would help the people around me, who might not have planned as well as I did.?

Below is a screenshot from my "DareTable" a database that runs my life. That red box is a seven month whole in my career.

NO EVENTS, KNOW COMMUNITY

The first solution I built was a community management tool.?

A simple website allowed neighbors to quickly deploy a SAAS-based system to request and offer help. The Neighborhood COVID tracker is no-code, open-source, and free to use to this day!??

More than a year later, it still sits at the #1 spot on?AirTable universe. It was also covered by?"The Atlantic"??magazine in a special on mutual aid networks!

I'll never understand how or why everything I do with tech gets picked up by the mainstream press, but here is a tip for anyone who wants my coverage. Stop thinking and start doing; the press will just happen.

After the neighborhood tracker, it became apparent that a crisis as big as healthcare would be financial. So I built another system.

This one to?manage unemployment, government programs, and even bankruptcy.??Like the kids say today, "adulting" can be hard.

VIRTUAL EVENTS SUCK

Long before we had "Zoom Fatigue", no one liked virtual events.?

There are precisely three books inside me concerning why virtual events don't work, but I'll save you the time -Digital dualism killed them.??

Digital dualism is the belief that what happens online is less real than what happens in your kitchen. Digital dualism is the belief that your children don't have "real" friends on TikTok or PlayStation. Digital dualism is a cult of personality that informs you that social media is terrible.??

If only the world had listened when I said?"Don't Unplug"?in 2017.

Virtual events suck because we made "real life" some fairytale version of reality where technology doesn't live, and we give each other our undivided attention.

So learning to be successful at virtual events meant I had to create, plan, participate and manage a few!

By the fall of 2020, I got lucky; I?created a conference?with over a thousand people to showcase "No code solutions" built on Airtable. I learned a lot about planning and interactivity by doing my own event.

Next, I was asked to Emcee an event for a local health organization in Pittsburgh. Finally, by late fall, Nokia reached out for a media and keynote collaboration.?

It was a combination of live studio footage, recording, and interactivity.?

Nokia was mind-blowing because of how much effort we put into the content and a mix of deliverables for the show. Check out what amazing looked like in a time, no one knew!

By early 2021, I was asked to design events for Northeastern University and the?US Army. Tough topics like handling suicide, depression, rape, assault, and finding and keeping your values despite using technology.

THE RETURN OF EVENTS

In early August 2021, HIMSS, one of the world's largest conferences with over 100K people, held its annual event.

I was asked to be a digital ambassador, essentially, a host. Not at my desk, in my slippers, but live, with a crew and cameras in Las Vegas.

Could I do it? Could I get on a plane and be around strangers again? Was it possible to be live in front of tens of thousands of people?

My job was simple, carry the audience through a week's worth of live content and be myself.

Needless to say, my "health anxiety" took a hit, but like I always do, I powered through.

HIMMS was unique. Isn't it always??

They didn't do a virtual event, they didn't do a live event, they did a hybrid event.?

Yes were live in Vegas, with vendors and staff, but we were also streamed LIVE around the world like a TV show.?

Not from the main stage, that did happen, but also from a sound stage.

HIMSS, like Nokia before it, the US Army blended live elements and virtual elements and hung it all on the framework of empowerment.

You can do work, consume content, and be connected anywhere with any technology.?

That's kind of my thing; it's why I consider myself "Grandpa Cyborg."

So that's it, events are back. I've learned a lot, and it feels good to be strutting my stuff on stage again.

So here are my tips for you event organizers, salespeople, booth warriors, and speakers.

EVENT REALITY 101 :

1. Plan, plan, plan, and replan:?You need to know who, what, where when how. You need to see it in a Gantt chart, and you need to link it to your outcomes.
2. Stop talking about virtual like it's an option; it's now a requirement(and stop saying virtual):??Seriously, stop the digital duality; virtual events are events. And you're messing them up by acting like they live in a vacuum-packed bubble. Hire speakers and planners that FREE your content and speakers.
3. Skip the big names:?Understand your audience is watching you in their underwear. Most of your speakers are boring, and high ticket speakers like celebrities won't pull more significant registrations. You need real people, people messing up, not reading a script. You need humans, being human with technology because no one likes to watch actors.?
4. Understand Health Anxiety, not safety risk: Regardless of what variants or future disasters we have, most people are now like me (I'm getting used to how this life is rolling like this). That means 50% of your audience has some form of anxiety related to their health or being in public. Make accommodations for people, talk about anxiety and embrace it. It's never too late to act like an adult, now is that time.
5. Apply your values to technology today:?Start today, map your values and start using technology to live by them. It can be as simple as a list on your phone or as complex as a database linking purchases and appointments to family values.

WHAT'S NEXT?

If you haven't seen my keynotes in years, you should come to see me soon.?

Seriously, I'm the kind of speaker with the type of talk that Disney should make a show out of.?

In the past eight years, what I have done to fuse my quantified self with my qualitative home life would blow your mind.?

Like everything in life, this doesn't have to be my story; it can be yours.

My entire life is mapped to my values, and I can link my heartbeats to the items I purchased when they happened.?

I just didn't save my life with technology; I monopolized my very belief systems with silicon.

Want a preview??

Give me 20 mins next week at TEC2021?The Experts Conference, a free event where I'm the closing keynote. I promise you'll either hire me instantly or force me to coach your family, team, or community.

The session was designed for tech audiences:

Disaster Recovery for Life -How Technology Saved My Life and Can Save Yours Too:?From the Waffle House to the White House, there isn't an IT job Chris Dancy didn't tackle from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Systems were loud, on-premises, needing our full attention!

Fast Forward to the end of the decade, and while the systems he managed were sound, his life was falling apart.?100 pounds overweight, chain-smoking, doing and saying whatever he could to keep things moving forward.

What would happen if Chris used the same skills that created his IT career to recover his personal life? How would a good dose of digital disruption and security reboot his failing architecture?

See you there, trust me, I'm a cyborg, but so are you.