the story behind #iPLAY24H "the big one"

While designing #play14 with my friends Yann Gensollen and Cedric Pontet seven years ago, we had the idea to bring the conference to the people. In my crazy mind, a quote from an old musketeers movie echoed "si tu ne viens pas à Lagardère, Largardère viendra à toi."

Since the very beginning of that journey of close to 60 events by now, playing together was a dream.

Thanks to COVID-19, we found a window of opportunity.

Designing a global event running 24H is challenging. Not because of the length of the time zones alignments, but because it is new. You have to imagine everything from scratch.

And we designed it in three weeks with most of the people working, engaged in other conferences, making holidays. We applied what we know the best of agile organizational design, facilitation and service design to ensure the engagement of local communities, ensure the engagement of organisation team members, ensure the alignment and freedom to self-organising of the local communities, find Zoom Accounts, deciding what tools are the best and most of all, ensuring to transmit the #play14 experience virtually, all over the planet during 24 hours.

I was confident. I had the vision but that's not enough. It is not mine. It has to be a collective event. I have to avoid convincing and over-selling. I had to tell the story where everyone can be the hero, like in Avengers End Game where all the heroes you love are in the same picture frame.

#play24H "the big one", was unique. Unique because, in open space tech language, we had more bees than butterflies.

Thank you for all the 150 participants from all over the world. But mostly, thank you the organization team:

• Hanna Karlsson (Sydney)
• Jerome Bourgeon (Singapore)
• Simon Jaillais (Singapore)
• Dianna Verlaan (Sydney)
• Andreas Fechner (Berlin)
• Arev Hakobyan (Vaughan, Ontario)
• Astrid Varchmin (Auckland, NZ)
• Christoph Reinicke (Stuttgart)
• Elsa Wormeck (Berlin)
• Javier Pecci (Madrid)
• Jordan Gross (Utrecht)
• Josenagel Dominguez (Madrid)
• Jürgen Rambo (Stuttgart)
• Manolo Lopez (Madrid)
• Neha Thaker (Oakville, Ontario)
• Robyn Backhouse (London)
• Andy Nguyen (Toronto)
• Ulises Aguila (Mexico City)

"play it again and make it better!"

"Un pour tous, tous pour un"

XO

Pierre