@ronne I wonder if you can get the conversation close to people's personal experiences? I notice the most engaging conversations for me are the ones where there's some real vulnerability in the room. It sucks if this vulnerability is only being shared by some marginalised person who's vulnerability is being instrumentalised for the education of all the other participants. So I'm wondering if there is a way to invite everyone to share a little bit of their vulnerable personal experience with power in tech?

You can ask for feelings, ask for stories, use your curiosity to get a little deeper into the conversation: *when you said X, can you tell me more about how that felt?', or 'do you have a recent example from your life you can share?'. If you see someone nodding strongly or making mmmmhmmm noises you can ask them if they want to share what's going on for them.

Other things you can do to break the infinite-monologue dynamic: silence! As a moderator you can make silence normal, invite people to take a few moments to be mindful and quiet before jumping to the next thing, leave space for processing and noticing what is coming up. Conferences are often over stimulating so it is a relief to have a relaxing moment of quiet time.

Also in a big conference I have used a rough version of 1-2-4-all to get audience participation. Like:

• you pose a question/provocation to the audience
• everyone reflects quietly on their own for 1 minute
• then pair up with a neighbour to share for 2 minutes (maybe: is there something you 2 have in common? or interesting points of difference?)
• then the pairs pair up into a group of 4 and they share for 4 minutes. They can be looking for shared understanding, or just hearing what kind of different responses everyone has.
• Then in the final phase, you can move a microphone through the room and hear from some of the groups of 4.

It kinda sorta worked pretty well in a conference auditorium: pair up with your neighbour, then talk to a pair that is in front of or behind you.

Maybe you can also get consent from the audience or the panel to help people to not take up too much time on the mic? Sometimes when I'm moderating, at the start of a session like this I will ask for permission like, sometimes I go on too long because I'm very enthusiastic about a topic, and then later I feel embarrassed for talking too much and not leaving space for others, so I really like it when there's a moderator who can give me a signal to wrap it up. Are people comfortable if I use [some hand gesture] to indicate 'wrap it up'?

@ronne I would usually do 1-2-4-all towards the end of the session, after the panelists have set the scene.

Generally after 30-45 minutes of experts addressing a room, there's a kind of pressure in the audience, people who are really eager to say stuff. Maybe they had a new insight, maybe they process things verbally, maybe they feel the need for some attention, or they would like to be validated as having expertise on par with the panelists.

If at this point you open up the mic with "any questions?", usually what you get is a couple of long monologues from the people who are most eager to speak. Most of the time they start with, "More of a comment than a question really..."

I use small group methods (like 1-2-4-all) at this point, so there's a space to release the pent-up pressure of I have things to add!!, without having to take up the listening capacity of the whole room. Once the pressure is released, then it is easier to get to a different kind of inquiry. You can ask people to think about what questions would be most interesting for the room to hear answers to.