Every year, the OTT Conference brings together researchers, practitioners, and policy influencers from across the world for a few days of conversation, debate, and connection. The 2026 OTT Conference convened more than 150 participants from over 50 countries.
What most attendees experience is the programme: 4 keynote sessions, 18 parallel sessions, 8 peer assist sessions, 3 fringe events, a public event, and more. They are focused on the ideas exchanged, the connections made, and the debates that carry over into coffee breaks at the venue and even onto dinner tables after the sessions.
What most attendees don’t see is everything that had to happen for that experience to exist.
As a member of the OTT team who worked on the logistics of this year’s conference, I want to share a behind-the-scenes look at what it actually takes, as an honest account of what event organisation involves and why it matters.
The invisible work: a list of all that had to be managed
1. Months of coordination before anyone boards a plane. Long before the first participant arrived, there were months of back-and-forth with our partners, the Policy Center for the New South (PCNS) in Rabat. Room layouts, accessibility considerations, breakout space logistics. Every confirmation requires follow-up; every detail, however small, has to be agreed on explicitly. Working remotely and across different time zones means a lot of shared documents, many early-morning (in my case) or late-night calls, and a genuine appreciation for the people on the other end who are just as committed to making it work.
2. Building and managing the programme. The agenda for OTT 2026 included 18 parallel sessions and 8 peer support sessions. Not all of them ran simultaneously, but there were times when five sessions were happening at the same time across multiple rooms, all with multiple conveners attending from different countries. Each session requires conveners, a brief to share internally and one to share externally, a tech check, a time slot, and a series of discussions that ensure the session has a clear purpose connected to the overall theme. Coordinating that across a team distributed across continents (four out of five, to be exact!) means a fair share of shared files, meetings after meetings, huge email threads, and a lot of “can everyone please check this and answer before your end of the day?
3. The usual travel nightmares. For an international event of this nature, many participants require a visa support letter to apply for their visa; in this case, the Moroccan visa. Drafting, reviewing, and sending those letters is a process that sounds straightforward and easy, but, in practice, is anything but.
Some participants received their visas after the date they had originally planned to travel. A few arrived in Rabat later than expected as a result. And yet, they came anyway.
And then, in the middle of it all, the U.S. attacked Iran and air traffic through the Gulf was interrupted.
That is worth pausing on: the excitement for the OTT Conference was such that people reorganised flights, rerouted journeys, and showed up. That kind of commitment from participants is not something the programme produces on its own. It is built over years of community.
4. Accommodation management. For a portion of attendees, the team managed hotel reservations directly: coordinating bookings, handling changes, chasing confirmations, sending hotel vouchers, changing arrival and departure dates, arranging late check-outs, requesting reservations at the hotel, and ensuring everything was in order on arrival.
For others, we provided recommendations. The PCNS campus is located well outside the city centre, so finding convenient accommodation required knowing Rabat well enough (or doing extensive research about the city) to steer people in the right direction so they would stay in convenient areas. Neither task is glamorous. Both are essential to making sure people arrive well-rested and ready to participate in the Conference.
5. Transport logistics. Getting more than 150 people from over 30 hotels to the PCNS venue every morning was not a simple operation, especially when the campus sits far from the city centre. This year, we coordinated 9 shuttle buses departing from 4 different pickup points across Rabat. Those pickup points were determined by mapping where each attendee was staying and grouping them geographically, so that routes made sense.
Every morning brought its own rhythm: shuttles ready, drivers informed, and at least 10 calls with the transportation company manager before departures were confirmed. At most departure times, the buses weren’t full, so the drivers had to decide what to do. Nobody wanted to leave any attendee behind, which meant holding departures, checking lists, and making judgment calls in real time about when to go and when to wait a little longer.
And then there were the things left behind. Each morning, once the shuttles pulled away, the messages or calls from the transportation company started coming in with information on how the shuttle went, and on one occasion, they let us know someone had lost their glasses, without which getting through a day of reading and discussion is not exactly easy. Tracking down drivers, arranging for belongings to be retrieved and returned, and doing all of this discreetly enough that the person could walk into a session without the distraction of wondering where their things were. Small problems. Necessary solutions.
6. Registration. Most people think that online registration closes quickly, a week before the event. Spoiler: they don’t. Some participants registered the weekend before the conference, when the person who managed the registration list was travelling for 24 hours with limited access to the platform and couldn’t check the new registrations until arriving in Rabat. Others registered the same day it started. Each late registration triggered its own small chain of tasks: updating the attendee list, notifying the relevant people, and, most urgently, sorting the badge situation.
The personalised badges were designed, printed, and produced by an external provider well in advance. Late registrations meant working around that with creativity and goodwill: for those who registered at the last minute, the badge situation was sorted out by the second day. Not ideal, perhaps, but everyone got theirs in the end.
There is the front desk itself, which is a logistical operation in its own right. Badges are sorted alphabetically, which helps, but only up to a point. You don’t know when any given person is arriving: someone whose surname starts with A might show up mid-session; someone whose surname starts with W might be first through the door. Every registration requires finding the right badge, confirming the person’s details, and ensuring they leave the desk oriented and ready while the next person waits. Multiply that by more than 150 people arriving across an uneven stretch of time; some getting in on the morning of day one, others mid-session, others expecting a badge they registered for 48 hours ago, and you have a task that requires patience, focus, and the ability to stay calm when the queue behind you is growing.
7. The F@ck-up Night. In a sector that takes its work seriously (as it should), there is something genuinely valuable about a space where mistakes can be named, laughed at, and set down. The F@ck-up Night is not a footnote to the conference. It is, in its own way, one of the most honest expressions of the community OTT has built.
However, this beloved conference tradition requires its own logistics: a restaurant reservation for a big group that sometimes restaurant managers don’t want to host for the logistical challenge it can represent, sound equipment, a microphone, and enough time to make sure the space and setup are ready for an evening that is, by design, unscripted. Sonja Stojanovic-Gajic and Goran Buldioski host it, and the attendees nurture it; the logistics team makes it possible.
Things that go wrong. Things go wrong, no matter how carefully you plan. We had a problem with the catering on day 1. We sorted it out. And a couple of hours later, someone took the microphone at the F@ck-up Night and made it the punchline of the evening. “I have two f@ck ups: the first one is that I ordered the food today”. The room laughed. And the worry I was carrying melted away. That moment is worth holding on to.
On what it means to serve this amazing community
There is a particular kind of pressure in producing an event like this one: the standard you are held to is the absence of problems. Do your job well, and “nothing happens”. Do it badly, and everything is visible. It is, by design, a role that succeeds by being invisible.
But invisibility is not the same as insignificance.
At OTT, we talk a lot about serving our community: the think tank professionals, researchers, and practitioners who make up our network. Serving them well means more than putting on an event. It means respecting the time they dedicate to us and our shared mission, anticipating their needs, creating the conditions for the conversations that matter to them, listening to them, and acting on the knowledge they share.
The shuttle that leaves on time means a thinktanker from Kenya walks into the welcome session without the stress of a late start. The accommodation recommendation that lands well means a participant from South Korea arrives rested and ready to share ideas with someone from Brazil. The visa letter sent in time for the appointment means someone from a context where getting a visa is never routine can show up at all. These are not administrative tasks that sit beside the real work. They are the real work made concrete.
So, when something goes wrong, what matters is how you respond and whether the people you are there to serve still feel cared for.
We are here to serve the think tank community. Not perfectly, but honestly, carefully, and with full commitment to the work. And we do it because we believe in what this community does, and because we know that what happens in those rooms matters far beyond the three days we spend at the Conference.