In the past, Best of VoiceCon has been voted on by attendees, but starting this year, Best of VoiceCon is going to be a juried award, in which my co-chairman, Fred Knight, and I will be joined by a panel of five judges to scrutinize entries. We’ll hold a preliminary round of voting to choose up to 6 Finalists, then we’ll hold briefings with each of the Finalist entrants, preparatory to a vote for the final Best of VoiceCon winner. It’s a significant time commitment on the part of the judges.

Our previous method of having the attendees choose the Best of VoiceCon wasn’t a bad way to do it, but we feel that this year and going forward, the entrants will be subject to much more intense and focused scrutiny than the average VoiceCon attendee had time to put into their votes in previous years. As a result, we believe that the new Best of VoiceCon award will be a major event for the industry, something that the Winner and the Finalists can point to as a meaningful recognition of the importance of their offered products.

VoiceCon Exhibitors who want all the specific rules and the online entry form can go here—and the deadline for entries is THIS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 5.

I want to emphasize that the purpose of these awards is to recognize forward-looking, even revolutionary product offerings. We’re at an inflection point in the communications industry: A lot of the fundamental assumptions about architectures and elements of communications systems are being called into question. What will the future really look like in enterprise communications? Of course we hope that the whole VoiceCon event, conference and exhibition, will help you answer that question, but we especially hope that the new Best of VoiceCon award will become a lodestar for the migration.

Fred and I will be joined in the Best of VoiceCon judging by the following distinguished panel:

* Michael Finneran, President, dBrn Associates
* Marty Parker, Principal, UniComm Consulting
* Sorell Slaymaker, Communications Architect, Unified IT Systems
* David Stein, Principal, PlanNet Consulting
* Allan Sulkin, President, TEQConsult Group

We’ll present the award on the Wednesday morning of VoiceCon Orlando, March 24. Again, exhibitors and everyone else can get more info on the award at http://www.voicecon.com/bestofvoicecon/. I’m excited about the judging process and the award that it will result in.

A key idea is that each VoiceCon live event session should really be a node on a network of discussion about that session’s topic. The session shouldn’t just last an hour in San Francisco in November, then be over forever. As soon as we come up with the session, it should come to life on the Web, as a place where everyone can discuss that topic, post links to materials, etc. In turn, that online discussion should inform the session that’s actually conducted on site. And then the results of that on-site session should feed back into the online discussion.

That kind of a setup helps on-site attendees use their time on site more efficiently. They can “preview” the sessions, bone up on the topic, generally get a better sense of which to attend live, and get more out of that particular session. And obviously, those who can’t attend can still get a lot of information from this sort of session-based Forum.

The ultimate goal is to link these session-based topical Forums to the wealth of content we generate out of VoiceCon: Slides, videos, slidecasts; as well as collateral that can be added by anyone: White papers, Comments, links to blogs, and anything else that anyone can think of.

We’ve made a start on this effort, though I’ll be the first to admit it’s a little bit of a kludge. If you go to the VoiceCon SF program webpage, every session description has a link that says, “DISCUSS THIS SESSION.” Clicking on that link will take you to a feedback site where you can discuss the session topic. We’ve seeded each of these feedback forums with Discussion Topics which are basically the Key Questions that we include in each VoiceCon session description. You can discuss the topic by giving your thought on those session questions, or if there’s an issue we didn’t include in the session questions, you can start up a new thread by entering your topic in the box underneath where we ask, “What else?”

For example, if you’re interested in our Tuesday session, “I’m a Nortel Customer–What Do I Do Now?” just go to that session description and click on the “DISCUSS THIS TOPIC” link. It’ll take you to this page, where you can weigh in.

The feedback forums feature a voting system that let you tell us which questions/topics you think are most important. I’m happy to get this type of feedback, but I think the real value of this format is going to be just in the discussion threads.

It’s tough to start a community on the Web by just telling people, “Discuss.” Hopefully, building our forums around the session topics will jump-start things and build toward a productive experience that may be highlighted by a show in Orlando or San Francisco, but doesn’t begin or end there.

www.voicecon.com/virtualevents

That’s http://www.voicecon.com/virtualevents

That’s www.voicecon.com/virtualevents.

So go to www.voicecon.com/virtualevents and register.

That’s www.voicecon.com/virtualevents, or you can go straight to the registration page.

We’re not going to be changing focus, but we are changing our approach. The impetus is the fact that, as everyone knows, justifying travel expenses is getting harder and harder. We believe we’ve got compelling content, but what we needed to do was make sure every last second of the San Francisco event–and all other VoiceCons moving forward–represents something you can’t get any other way besides getting on a plane and flying to our show. We think that, given the advances in technologies like video, social networking, Second Life and so forth, that travel will probably always require a strong justification, even when the economy turns around and budgets ease up a bit.

So to start our planning, we got back to basics: We’ve got a building, and we’ve got three and a half days. What can we put into that place and time?

We’ve begun answering that question in broad terms: There should be demo sessions; you can get demos on the show floor, but having something like a hands-on experience from a third-party, objective instructor is even more valuable. We should make sure attendees have as many opportunities as possible to get face time, in groups as small as possible, with experts that they simply don’t come into contact with in their daily lives in the office.

We’re about to begin the process of translating these ideas into a plan that can actually deliver these opportunities to our attendees. As always, we welcome your suggestions about things you’d like to see at the show. Now’s the time to speak up–we’re open to everything.