Kristen Van Nest recently wrote an interesting article for VentureBeat called “For Women, Conferences can be a Powerful Career Booster.”

Van Nest wrote that the women she has spoken with have found “models and mentors within their fields” through conference participation.

The downside, though, is that “they also spoke of how few women are taking advantage of these opportunities.” 

That’s unfortunate, because “conferences provide great opportunities for women to share advice, forge supportive relationships and build their network,” Van Nest said.

In fact, columnist Tim Sanders says sharing knowledge is one of the five best gifts for others. 

“Knowledge is a resource that grows as you give it away,” he wrote in our June issue. “Too often, we think of generosity in material terms, but in fact, one of the most generous things you can do is to mentor someone during his or her time of opportunity. You should always have an active mentee. Look for someone in transition, usually taking on a new task or role, where your insights can help.”

Conferences provide an excellent opportunity to share knowledge, become a mentor or mentee and educate yourself. 

“Education is, by far, women’s most powerful secret weapon, and we have been preparing for a sneak attack for at least the last decade,” said educator and author Katharine Hansen, Ph.D. on Quintessential Careers. “In 1975, a majority of the college degrees awarded went to men. This was true at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s, first professional and doctorate levels. By 2000, a majority of the associate, bachelors and master’s degrees were awarded to women, according to the Postsecondary Education Opportunity Research Letter.”

Hansen says that women are making serious inroads in the knowledge is power equation, and their best hope to crash through the glass ceiling is to keep doing what they’re doing.

“Consider informal ways of educating yourself through, for example, joining professional organizations, attending conferences and keeping up with trade publications in your field,” Hansen said. 

Well, now, I believe we here support all three of those strategies. Won’t you? 

Editor Michael Pinchera is reporting from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where he is attending the Women Deliver 2013 Conference, which focuses on the health and empowerment of girls and women worldwide. 

Romilly Martin is leveraging the power of meetings and events to transform the future of girls—and the world.

As senior brand and creative specialist at the Nike Foundation, Martin said she worked with an inspiring team to bring forth the dreams of impoverished girls in such a way that the importance of their messages cannot be ignored—a modern take on the Japanese wish tree.

The Girl Tree, a component of the Foundation’s Girl Effect project, is the eye-catching realization of Martin’s team. Debuted at the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this week, the Tree blossoms with the aspirations of girls from seven nations, hand-written on wooden tablets.

Some of the tablets glow, much like the authors, with an inner light—literally. The lit-up tablets share each story aurally as well as through the written work. Press a button on one of the glowing slabs and the voice of the girl behind that dream reports out, in her native tongue as well as English.

“The thing I most want is to have an encyclopedia because I want to have more knowledge,” one tablet representing a 12-year-old girl from China vocalized. 

The Girl Effect is driven by the idea that “girls are the most powerful force for change on the planet.” Through the Girl Tree, placed at a prominent junction on the Women Deliver trade show floor, Romilly Martin and the Nike Foundation combine the power of creative design, storytelling and the medium of meetings and events to enhance awareness of the global need to empower girls. And they’re already planning to gather stories from girls in even more nations to keep the message going—this is a real issue and it’s global.

Teal Brown, associate director of williamsworks, which has been involved with the Girl Tree exhibit, shared that it's important and very cool to present the project in such a high-level meetings environment as the Women Deliver conference.

Thank you to the Malaysia Convention & Exhibition Bureau, which was kind enough to invite me to experience first-hand how an important international event such as Women Deliver is executed and supported by the bureau, the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center and the Malaysian government. Truly an outstanding feat.

The European Meetings & Events Conference (EMEC) is quickly approaching (still time to register!), and I thought it would be interesting to learn why certain speakers were chosen for the event.

The opening general session, for example, features two great speakers: Bertrand Piccard and Doug Keeley. 

"When we were going to Switzerland, his [Piccard] name came up right, front and center as the person everyone would really like to see as the keynote speaker of EMEC13," said MPI Knowledge Manager Miranda van Brück. "I personally missed seeing his speech when I attended EMEC in Brussels (MPI’s PEC-E was what it was called back then) and started to check videos on him online and read interviews with him and articles about him and was sold immediately." 

She says that Doug Keeley was introduced through networking. 

"Samme Allen (our U.K. and Ireland Chapter president) had seen him speak at the introduction of the Mark of the Leader in the U.K. and enthusiastically introduced us, and the rest is history," van Brück said.

EMEC also offers several sessions that will elevate your professional and personal lives.   

"I am enormously looking forward to so many of the sessions," van Brück said. "It is hard to put a spotlight on some when one has been so closely involved in the whole process. I am really happy that we have been able to persuade Alexander Osterwalder to join us in Montreux. I had try to bring him to one of our conferences in the past, but agendas never matched, till now! 

"I am also very happy that Alise Long and her husband Roger will be presenting the session 'Connecting Your Global Company in One Single Event'," she continued. "Alise is a long-time MPI member and the 2012 RISE Award winner, and I find it fantastic that we can feature Alise, who is a corporate planner for DSM in her daily life at our conference. And again the power of connectivity. The connection with Alise goes back many years, when I worked as a sales manager for a conference hotel in the Netherlands and Alise was one of my main clients. We have delivered many great events together in the past, so I know how valuable it will be for our audience to hear her story and be able to learn from her."

There are also some chapter sessions that are sure to spark engagement.

"I am very proud that we will be able to feature some of the Best of the Best education of our chapters," van Brück said. "MPI The Netherlands and MPI Spain are sending their top scoring speakers to Montreux to have the EMEC13 participants experience where their local community back home was raving about. And to see the creativity that one of these chapters will be putting into the onsite promotion of this session is truly amazing. What a passion for MPI and their chapter!" 

As I mentioned, there is still time to register for this great conference, and as a bonus, check out this video from 60 Minutes about Bertrand Piccard and his goal of flying a solar-powered plane around the world.

We recently published a column by Jackie Mulligan about why downtime is critical for your conference. 

"Many people report their most creative moments come to them when they least expect it, when they just begin drifting off to sleep, when they take a shower or simply ride a bus," Mulligan wrote. "New ideas squeeze into our consciousness when our mind takes a break. This is why downtime rocks."

Another reason downtime rocks is because it reinforces newly learned information. In an article to be published in the journal Psychological Science, a publication of the Association for Psychological Science, psychological scientist Michaela Dewar and her colleagues show that memory can be boosted by taking a brief wakeful rest after learning something verbally new and that memory lasts not just immediately but over a longer term.

“Our findings support the view that the formation of new memories is not completed within seconds,” Dewar said. “Our work demonstrates that activities that we are engaged in for the first few minutes after learning new information really affect how well we remember this information after a week.”

In two separate experiments, a total of 33 normally aging adults between the ages of 61 and 87 were told two short stories and told to remember as many details as possible. Immediately afterward, they were asked to describe what happened in the story. Then they were given a 10-minute delay that consisted either of wakeful resting or playing a spot-the-difference game on the computer.

During the wakeful resting portion, participants were asked to just rest quietly with their eyes closed in a darkened room for 10 minutes while the experimenter left to “prepare for the next test.” It didn’t matter what happened while their eyes were closed, only that they were not distracted by anything else and not receiving any new information.

When participants played the spot-the-difference game, they were presented with picture pairs on a screen for 30 seconds each and were instructed to locate two subtle differences in each pair and point to them. The task was chosen because it required attention but, unlike the story, it was nonverbal.

In one study, the participants were asked to recall both stories half an hour later and then a full week later. Participants remembered much more story material when the story presentation had been followed by a period of wakeful resting.

Dewar explains that there is growing evidence to suggest that the point at which we experience new information is “just at a very early stage of memory formation and that further neural processes have to occur after this stage for us to be able to remember this information at a later point in time.”

We now live in a world where we are bombarded by new information, and it crowds out recently acquired information. The process of consolidating memories takes a little time and the most important things that it needs are peace and quiet.

Remember that the next time you attend or plan a conference. 

(Story materials via the Association for Psychological Science.)

Every day it's looking more and more like you won't need to carry a paper guide with you at a conference. You can already get session descriptions and speaker bios via event apps, and now Google is bringing their excellent map-making skills indoors. It's only a matter of time before it's available at conference centers around the world. Everywhere, trees are rejoicing. 

The International Council of Tourism Partners (ICTP) recently announced that Ray Bloom, IMEX Group Chairman, is the first person to be named to ICTP’s “Industry Visionaries” roll. ICTP has long been a supporter of IMEX America, and, equally important, has been a friend and admirer of Ray Bloom and what he has done for the meeting industry.

When Bloom was about to launch EIBTM more than 20 years ago, he visited with ICTP President Geoffrey Lipman in Geneva and laid out his plans to create the biggest MICE event ever. He had no backers—just an embryonic plan and a vision. Lipman remembers listening to Ray, smiling and thinking, “He’s charming, but he’s crazy!”

Over the years, Bloom proved Lipman wrong on the second point, and he even asked Lipman to keynote his first exhibition. Over the years, Lipman has had that honor several times—each to a bigger, more committed audience.

Today, Bloom is on the verge of fulfilling his great vision for the third time and in the process is playing an important role in advancing the travel industry on the world stage. He still remains the warm, personal, family-oriented man who has time for every exhibitor no matter whether they are big, small or simply a start-up.

Bloom's exhibitions are very important to ICPT, because they embody ICTP’s driving principles—the search for quality and recognition of the importance of the green agenda. The IMEX exhibitions also demonstrate the key contribution of the business travel sector to the broader visitor economy—a fact that is often lost in the word “tourism” and is frequently unrecognized by the policymakers who so strongly influence the collective destinies related to tourism.

“We are proud to make Ray Bloom the first name on ICTP’s 'Industry Visionaries' roll," Lipman said. "We salute him as a visionary, a creator and, above all, as someone who has remained a fundamentally decent person despite his great success.”

The following is a dispatch from Rob Cotter, a frequent One+ contributor, who is attending the IT&CMA conference in Bangkok, Thailand. 

This yearʼs 19th IT&CMA and 14th CTW, the double-bill event celebrating its 10th anniversary in Bangkok, unveiled a new logo to be used to promote their 2012 show. Explaining the new branding, Darren Ng, managing director of TTG Asia, explained that the retention of the red/blue IT&CMA lettering would maintain the representation of the "strength and global reach" of the MICE industry, and the CTW "coming out of the box" of its old design, highlighting the importance of this component of the double-bill.

The unveiling of the new logo was just the hors dʼoeuvres for some more significant announcements. Ng let the assembled press know that India would be part of the IT&CMA calendar starting in 2012, with the event scheduled for New Delhi in August. Reflecting a MICE market second only to China in its expansion, he sees this as “an opportunity to promote India to the world and the world to India.”

In addition, it was announced that in the future IT&CMA will include a luxury travel component, beginning in 2012. Now able to bill itself as not simply as Asiaʼs, but "the worldʼs only double-bill event," IT&CMA continues to explore how it can develop its content and geographic outreach, offering more locations and more opportunities to visitors.

—Rob Cotter