It’s all about networking: The Connecti Platform
MuC 2024 offered many opportunities to meet new people and extend your network. Connecti is a hybrid networking platform followed the theme of the conference on hybrid worlds and was designed to actively encourage and support MuC 2024 participants in networking.
The underlying approach of the platform and its networking game is simple: All conference participants were assigned to one of a total of 8 color-coded groups before the conference. The assignment was made visible on the badges of the participants. MuC participants could voluntarily join the platform by scanning the QR code at the back of the badge. By scanning the QR code at the front of the badge of any MuC participant it was possible to connect within and beyond groups and collect networking points (so-called Connecties). The underlying design of the game is cooperative and competitive. The overall goal for all participants was to collect as many as possible connection points over the conference. Furthermore, the groups compete against each other.
The 8 equal sized groups were formed based on the organization (practice / academic) and postal code captured in the registration system. Overall, to create balanced groups this led to 3 practice groups and 5 academics groups:
- “Practice“ groups: Orange (North) / Red (Center) / Blue (South)
- “Academics“ groups: Yellow / Magenta / Cyan (North / Center) and Purple / Green (South)
The participants did not know these rules during the conference. The networking game at MuC 2024 was very well received. A total of 579 people registered across the 8 groups. That’s pretty good, as we had a total of 614 participants, i.e. 94% registered voluntarily. Furthermore, 12072 connection points have been collected by establishing 2431 connections between the participants.
The resulting group network and ranking is depicted here:
The following picture depicts the live visualization of the networking graph and the group rankings during the social event at ZKM on September, 3rd 2024.
The networking platform has been developed for MuC 2024 in cooperation between members from the human-centered system lab of KIT (Alexander Maedche, Elias Mueller, Katharina Jacob), Bernd Lintermann (ZKM), and Florian Hertweck (Film University Babelsberg)