Events can be a powerful and productive way to engage any community -- as long as they reflect a diversity of people and perspectives. The creators of the popular Spark Camp series of professional conferences recently shared what they've learned about making events engaging and productive. Some of these lessons could apply to local community engagement.

Spark Camp is a series of themed conferences created by a team of media and technology luminaries (Amanda Michel, Amy Webb, Andrew Pergam, Matt Thompson and Jenny 8 Lee). These invitation-only events have received wide acclaim and spurred useful collaborations.

A recent report, Mastering the Art of Sparking Connections offers lessons learned from the five Spark Camp conferences held so far -- both what worked, and what didn't. Some points that could enhance events for local community engagement include:

Plan for diversity. "The more varied the group, the more valuable the connections and outcome. Before we decide on our individual invitees, we create what we call an 'attendee matrix,' which describes our desired composition of the group, their industries, experience levels and backgrounds.

"Some approaches to further increase each camp's diversity have been unsuccessful. At our first two Spark Camps, we asked attendees to suggest a '+1.' We thought this approach would necessarily introduce us to new people, and help organizers break out of their own professional networks. Instead, Campers tended to invite friends or former colleagues. People often doubled themselves demographically. For example, white men almost always invited other white men."

Discussion, not presentations. "Because we put so much work into bringing together people with unique perspectives, we find discussions to be a much better fit than presentations. We're not gathering to merely trade conventional wisdom or share best practices. The value of having all the different voices around the table is that it affords a better, stronger platform to debate, discuss and build on each other's assessments -- to enable conversations we can't (and don't) easily have online and in public."

Intimacy over publicity. "There's a tradeoff between in-person sharing and social buzz: the more publicly attendees share what they learn during an event, the less inclined they are to disclose valuable pieces of private knowledge. We want attendees to feel safe discussing failures as well as successes; to talk in real detail about processes and outcomes in their work. At the start of each Spark Camp we ask attendees to consider what they hear as protected by FrieNDA (an informal non- disclosure agreement we discovered at Tim O'Reilly's NewsFoo conferences).

Read the full report online. It's also available in downloadable PDF and ePub formats.