I don’t need to tell you that we’re living through an unprecedented time in so many aspects of life. There’s one (admittedly less important) aspect that the TCT content team has been agonising over and that is how to do virtual events. How, at a time when physical events are few and far between, do we help accelerate additive manufacturing technologies?
There have been A LOT of virtual events in the past four months that have attempted to replicate all the features of a physical event, from exhibitions to conferences and networking. The simple fact of the matter is that, as nice as some of the platforms are, replicating the interaction you get at a physical trade show online is simply not possible.
There are absolutely aspects of a physical show that can be replicated, for instance virtual conferencing can be great and TCT is planning a great one, albeit with a more curated approach to presentations, favouring applications over sales pitches.
But, truth be told, that is not new; our YouTube channel is packed with exceptional speakers and presentations from years of curation by conference professionals, and the beauty of that is you can watch whenever you want, not at a predetermined time set by a virtual event.
We’ve rejigged the YouTube channel and created industry vertical based playlists to help you build your own fantasy conference. As proof of concept the editorial team has each curated a Fantasy Conference Line-up and shared them on their blog pages.
- Daniel O'Connor's Fantasy Additive Manufacturing Conference Line-Up
- Laura Griffiths' Fantasy Additive Manufacturing Conference Line-Up
- Sam Davies' Fantasy Additive Manufacturing Conference Line-Up
As the Head of Content at TCT Group, it is my firm belief that setting a time and a date for your virtual event is adding a barrier for information access that needn’t exist; it’s a hangover from the drawbacks of physical conferencing. It’s comparable to the Netflix model of bingeing TV episodes, which has all but done away with the convention of scheduling. By making the entirety of a series available at once people can and will watch at their own leisure. TV scheduling only existed because of the limitations of terrestrial broadcast, so why artificially replicate that limitation in a virtual space.
“But what about networking?” I hear you cry. I must stress that this is a personal opinion but one that, canvassing opinions from colleagues and peers, I believe is shared; prescribed virtual networking sessions attached to virtual conferences don’t work; they're full of spam, interaction is stunted and there are too many interruptions from well meaning people, who ruin the flow. It's not a social norm to see a table at a physical event and infiltrate it, shouting "COME AND LOOK AT MY PRODUCT".
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
There is undoubtedly a need for the sharing of knowledge amongst professionals that usually happens at a TCT 3Sixty, a RAPID + TCT or an AMUG, but how would you do that online?
With this in mind we’ve asked the question, not how can we replicate, but how do people usually share knowledge online? The answer, we believe, is forums.
At TCT, we’ve been toying with creating an independent forum where people can impart their knowledge and help others out for a long time. COVID-19 has accelerated that desire and it just so happens that there’s a 21st Century solution to forum’s innate clunkiness on smartphones. It is called Discord.
There are plenty of 3D printing forums out there, but they tend to veer towards the hobbyist or act as a promotional vehicle for a specific company. What we want to do is create a place for additive manufacturing professionals to drive the conversation and ultimately accelerate the industry.
A forum, and therefore a Discord server, is nothing without its users and we’re reaching out to the whole TCT community to drive the discussions. We have plans to hold monthly knowledge bars where we’ll invite experts for Ask Me Anything sessions. Please join us on the Additive Manufacturing Global Community Discord Server.
Join our Discord
Team TCT is genuinely excited at this, we really believe this is a place for you, the additive manufacturing industry, to live online. It doesn’t by any means replace the physical events, in fact we hope that it encourages better networking at those events, like a Tinder for AM!
You may have also noticed the site has had something of a makeover, with so much content we realised it was perhaps a little difficult to navigate, so we’ve made it a little less confusing and hopefully more self-explanatory. For Additive Manufacturing technology news, there’s the news page split into different technological categories, for blogs see blogs, for events see events, and TCT Approved is where our sponsored White Papers and Webinars live.
I wanted to bring your attention to one more section; the 3D Printing and AM Resource Center. With 30 years of content in the back catalogue we realised there should be a place for readers to come to access case studies, expert analysis, podcasts, survey reports and all other manner of evergreen content. We’ve broken the case studies down, not by vertical but by level of AM implementation; if you’re looking at getting into AM for the first time the case studies tagged with “Evaluation” are a good place to start, those tagged with “Adoption” are for people who want to make better use out of existing equipment and “Optimization” is for those on the ladder looking into part consolidation, light weighting and series production.
Our digital offering is, and always has been, diverse. With this more joined-up approach, that diversity should make TCT a one-stop shop for all your AM needs.
