An Insider’s View of ILTA’s Ascend weekend
If you’ve ever been to ILTACON, you might have spent a moment or two wondering how this powerhouse of a conference comes about, with its many streams of educational sessions and its gargantuan vendor hall. It was certainly a mystery to me, just as the origins of the ILTA webinars and roundtables that circulate through my inbox were a mystery.
Last weekend I flew to Denver to attend Ascend, the ILTA volunteer event that is held annually to plan content for the coming year. My eyes were opened to the astonishing degree of planning and organization that goes into the content we all take for granted.
I started volunteering with ILTA a year ago, first as a member liaison – a role that involves building the ILTA community and local events in the city you represent – and now, additionally, as a member of a Content Coordinating Committee. ILTA is an organization powered by volunteerism. Although there are a number of permanent staff, headed up by CEO-extraordinaire Joy Heath Rush, the sheer number of events and the volume of professional development content generated by ILTA simply wouldn’t be possible without an army of volunteers pitching in at every level of the organization.
Each year, ILTA releases applications for volunteer positions on its website. Securing one requires a not insubstantial application process and vetting by fellow members and existing volunteers. The fact that ILTA has enough applications to its volunteer positions to necessitate such a vetting process speaks volumes about the way the organization is viewed in the legaltech community, and the satisfaction volunteers get from serving their industry body – many of them year after year. If you’re wondering who these volunteers are - they are your colleagues. ILTA volunteers all have busy day jobs at member organizations. They are IT managers, business analysts, eDsicovery specialists, knowledge managers, library directors. Every volunteer position has a particular number of points attributed to it, and there is a loose hierarchy imposed – to qualify for some positions, you have to have previously served in a role that falls somewhere lower on the point system.
All volunteers involved in content development are invited to attend Ascend, which usually takes place in the same city as ILTACON will later in the year, thus serving as a trial run for the conference venue. This year ILTACON will be in Nashville, Tennessee, but the venue couldn’t be secured for Ascend so instead we descended en masse on Denver and spent a long weekend surrounded by snowcapped mountains.
The structure of the many volunteer groups is complex (I called a board member for guidance before applying) - but there are handy resources on the ILTANET website that serve to unravel this web, including the full version of the graphic featured on this page. I sit on the KM & Marketing Content Coordinating Committee, and there are five other similar committees dedicated to generating content for additional topic areas. These committees develop content ideas and a schedule that births webinars, blog posts, podcasts, roundtables, and white papers throughout the year.
Another six committee groups, also distinguished by topic, are dedicated to developing the content for ILTACON. All of these committees report up into higher planning committees, and each committee has lead coordinators and an ILTA staff member assigned to ensure that content development and output runs seamlessly.
Planning started well before the Ascend weekend, with content coordinating committees meeting regularly and members responsible for generating 5-7 ideas each for their own topic area, as well as additional ideas for ILTACON. Various Slack channels are used to communicate amongst volunteers, and tools such as an idea contribution form may be accessed on a pass-coded section of the ILTA website.
By the time we arrived in Denver, our particular committee had a list compiled of some 57 ideas. Our job over the course of the weekend was to whittle that list down to the 24 sessions allotted for our subject area, to decide which topics should fall into which quarter, what form each idea would take, and which of us would be responsible for executing it. What seemed like an overwhelming task when we sat down early Saturday morning gave rise to a deeply satisfying sense of achievement when we walked out of the room that evening with a full year of interesting content mapped out. Speaking with volunteers on the ILTACON planning committees, it was similarly astonishing to find that virtually all of the many sessions for this year’s conference had already been pinned down.
Beyond the hours spent in productive planning meetings, the weekend was an outstanding opportunity to network with people across the United States, and even internationally. Volunteers attended from places as far-flung as Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Denmark, and the UK. I engaged in genuinely fascinating discussions with people in the shuttlebus on the way to the venue, at the lovely team-building dinner on the first night, and over the low-key picnic lunch before we all left on the Sunday.
This year, ILTA also organized a series of hackathons to address areas of priority for the ILTA board, engaging volunteers in the process of driving the organization’s strategic direction. I joined a hackathon on ILTA’s desire to extend its international reach, and left feeling truly optimistic about the increasingly global relevancy ILTA strives to attain.
There are many reasons to volunteer for ILTA. It’s giving back to your community, it will give you insight into subject matters and trends that your employer will value, it’s a support network for people with similar objectives and career aspirations, it’s educational, it looks good on a CV. But the real reason to dip your toe in if you’ve been hesitating is the people. The networking opportunities are rife, but even better - through the collegiality that is innate in this large pool of volunteers from across the country and across the world, lifelong friendships are often made.
