When hosting simply means being helpful

It's easy to forget that hosting means more than where to put your web site - it has a human side too, if done well at events. Unfortunately in our geekish concerns to build online communities with smarter tools and facilitation we can forget the older skills of looking after guests at face-to-face meetings and receptions. You know the sort of thing that happens ... no name badges, hosts talking to each other at the bar, other people reading handouts to avoid striking up conversations with strangers. Or a frenzy of over-organising as I found recently at a speed networking event.
It was therefore a great pleasure to go to a British Council event last night that was part of their 70th anniversary celebrations. Staff were not only welcoming, they were working hard at networking... introducing guests to others they might find interesting.

I had been invited because I ran a game and organised a blog at a recent British Council seminar, and the reception was for people involved in the Council's seminar programme. Very interesting they were too, although the bloggers code of discretion (is there one?) and generous quantities of white wine** draw a veil over the details.
The British Council is an extraordinary organisation, set up in 1934 with the title of 'British Committee for Relations with Other Countries', when an influential group of civil servants became convinced that ‘British’ values of parliamentary democracy could be subsumed by the rising tide of fascism. It was a propaganda organisation.
They are now are "the UK's international organisation for educational opportunities and cultural relations and are represented in 110 countries worldwide.
"In 2002-2003 alone just some of our activities included dealing with 2 million enquiries and welcoming 7 million visitors in our libraries and information centres, administering over 1 million professional and academic examinations, as well as helping more than 15,000 young people take part in international projects."
The seminar programme is enormous, but because participants are from overseas not, I think, as well-known in this country as it might be. The Council is a charity, receives a Government grant of £164 million, has a £479 million turnover, and employs 7,500 people.
The combination of helpful introductions and networking juice** gave me the opportunity and confidence to bang on to people about life is messy, as in "you know how we like to draw little diagrams showing how jobs are organised, people connected, action plans implemented.... but it never turns out like that? Well, what we need is the life is messy toolkit. A glorious jumble of good ideas on what to do when things aren't happening the way they should". When I got an encouraging smile I would then extemporise about how this could be a combination of a blog and wiki, a sort of collaborative 'how to' version of the Wikipedia.
It may be that it was the time of the evening when people find it best to feign interest and then quickly take the next networking opportunity, but it left me with enough ideas to get back today into experiments with the Wiki tool Editme. More on that later.
Meanwhile I'm left with a warm if fuzzy feel about the British Council, which I hope to turn into more opportunities for blogging and 'building bridges' as they like to say. This is marred only by the recollection that I was among the last to leave, and that's when good networkers become unwelcome guests. They would, of course, be much too polite to say that.