Since 1981, Adrian Segar has designed, convened, and facilitated hundreds of conferences all over the world. He has been designing participant-led and participation-rich events, commonly known as unconferences, since 1992.
Adrian’s first book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love, published in November 2009, has been described as “THE how-to manual” on creating events that truly engage and capitalize on attendees’ collective wisdom and experience.
His second book, The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences That Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action was described by Paul Salinger, VP of Marketing, Oracle, as a book that “should be open on every meeting planner and event marketer’s desk, and used every day.” It’s a compendium of participation techniques that meeting planners and presenters can use to significantly improve any meeting session or conference program.
Adrian’s latest book, Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need, is a comprehensive guide to creating events that reliably include the sessions and session content attendees actually want and need.
Adrian is an acknowledged meeting designer, facilitator, and presenter on participant-led event design, and facilitates four popular opening and closing plenaries — The Three Questions, The Solution Room, Personal Introspective, and Group Spective — at many conferences. He has presented and facilitated at just about every meetings industry event, including Professional Convention Management Association’s Convening Leaders, PCMA Education Conference, Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Congress, IBTM, MPI Chapter meetings, the MPI Chapter Business Summit, HSMAI MEET, theEVENT, and FRESH, GMIC & NESAE annual conferences.
Adrian has been named one of:
and has been quoted on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. He organized and moderated weekly #eventprofs Twitter chats for many years and is an active participant in event professional discussions on social media.
In 1973, Adrian earned a Physics B.A. as Postmaster at Merton College, Oxford. At the age of 25, he was awarded a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics from University College, London. Thirty-seven years later, the experiment he worked on was awarded the 2009 European Physics Prize. From 1978-1983 Adrian owned and managed Solar Alternative, a solar energy manufacturing company. He also taught college-level computer science at Marlboro College for ten years and was an independent information technology consultant between 1983-2007.
Adrian lives in Marlboro, Vermont, has founded two non-profits, and has served on numerous non-profit boards for over thirty years. He loves to sing and dance. You can learn more about him on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Mastodon.