A short digression on the use of social media and electronic questions, if I may. With time of the essence at such a vast event, the Planet under Pressure organisers decided early on to abandon conventional questions from the floor – and rely entirely on electronic questions sent in via Twitter, or text/sms, or directly through our live webstreaming page. And it worked! Reams of questions poured in: well over five hundred over the four day event. That, plus the ability to scan the questions on my ipad, gave me a far better chance to connect the audience to our plenary speakers and panellists than if I had simply called on random contributions from the floor. It also meant that a further three thousand or so people joining the conference via the live webstream could also participate by sending in their comments remotely. Best of all was: “no mic hogging from the floor”, as one tweet so memorably put it.

Other personal highlights: Sandra Diaz’s beautiful slides illustrating her presentation on biodiversity in peril; Lord Giddens of LSE’s humane wisdom; Bina Agarwal from Delhi University’s plea for small scale projects involving women; Richard Wilkinson’s persuasive evidence on how equality, not growth, is what delivers wellbeing; Oran Young and Maria Ivanona, who did the seemingly impossible and made governance interesting, even imperative. But the biggest surprise was Anne Glover, chief scientific advisor to the European Commission – was there ever such a blunt, outspoken, kick ass advisor as she?

Those are some of my personal takeaways from the crazy jamboree that was Planet Under Pressure. Please take a moment to add your own comments below – how was it for you?

PS: And I made a whole family of new friends too. From the IGBP: Wendy Broadgate, Owen Gaffney, Reed Evans, Hilarie Cutler, and my ace Twitter guru, Andrew Merrie. Also, Priya Shyamsunder, Felix Dodds and Nigel Cameron, not to mention the incomparable duo, Lidia Brito and Mark Stafford-Smith, plus always smiling, ever so helpful, John Ingram.

So on the one hand I’m feeling like an under-prepared student, on the other like a groupie at a rock concert: over two and a half thousand people gathered together at London’s Excel centre and who knows how many thousands joining us round the world via live web-streaming. That’s jaw-dropping.  How to make the event truly interactive when the audience will be so massive and far-flung? My role as conference moderator is to help audience members, wherever they may be, to question, perhaps even grill, our eminent panelists. Technology we hope will ride to the rescue by way of social media and a much battered iPad. The idea is that I’ll be gathering questions on the iPad via Twitter, sms/text messages and webstreaming,  instead of running around the auditorium with a mic in my hand to elicit audience participation. Will the technology work? Will the audience take up the challenge and tweet/text/webstream their questions? I must admit to feeling a few butterflies. Let’s hope Steve Jobs, the godfather of the iPad is looking down on us all next week with a benign smile.

Most of my work is with  large corporates or mega organisations like the UN – not exactly social media savvy – hosting conferences, panel debates and advising on presentation skills. So imagine my surprise when my blog caught the eye of a corporate communications expert, working on a corporate identity rethink with a major European food business. It was Twitter that brought it to his attention and ‘story telling’  that caught his eye.

Story telling is a journalistic skill which works wonders when someone is preparing a big, barn-storming speech.  Turns out the journalist’s favourite technique is a great way to bring corporate message alive in all sorts of different contexts – not just in front of an audience of hundreds. In this case the client, a food company, wants staff and management to communicate with more authenticity with everyone from farmers, to customers, consumers and  regulators…

The project is just beginning, more to follow in the months to come. Meanwhile, a big thank you to Jurgen Mortier (@jurgenmortier) who spotted my blog on Twitter!

The conference heard heart-rending testimony from someone who came face to face with the ugly face of piracy: Captain Makne, whose crew was captured despite putting up a valiant defence. It was all over so quickly, he told us.  Despite protecting the ship with barbed wire, and using water jets to repel the pirates, they still managed to get on board, firearms bristling, and then the nightmare began. A seven month long ordeal, during which Captain Makne and his men were at the mercy of their violent and unpredictable captors – Somali youths, intoxicated out of their minds on qat and impatient for their payoff. Because that’s what it’s all about. Piracy may once have been about small-time banditry but no longer.

Indian Ocean piracy today is a lucrative, highly organised business stemming from the long-running Somali civil war with tentacles that stretch much further. Its financial backers have connections throughout the region lured by multi-million dollar pay-offs. Why? Because the ransoms being paid for seamen taken hostage have soared by a factor of ten since 2006 to an average of $4m – $5m today. The financial links are murky and are thought to stretch far beyond the Somalian pirates who actually carry out the attacks to a host of intermediaries and financiers around neighbouring African countries and into the Gulf region.

And it’s getting progressively worse, year by year despite the presence of around twenty warships from the world’s main trading nations around the Horn of Africa and along the West coast of India. And despite the occasional, successful naval counter-attack, most recently on the day of the India Shipping Summit itself, when an Italian ship was re-taken by British and American special forces within 24 hours of capture. A rare victory.

The shipping industry has reluctantly moved towards putting armed guards on board ships. Britain is the latest nation to endorse this controversial step,  supported in the main by the delegates in Mumbai, though there were some dissenting voices who warned against the potential hazards of putting mercenaries on board commercial vessels.

I leave you with this thought: at the beginning of 2011, at the height of the ‘hostage season’ there were over seven hundred seamen being held hostage. Did you know that? No,  me neither. The vast majority of hostages are poor Asians – from India, China, Philippines and elsewhere, who can languish for months with scant attention from the world’s media. The mood of the Indian Shipping Summit was sombre, despairing even. They don’t hold out much hope for improvement any time soon. What do you think?

The reason is simple – criminalization. Across the Western world, people with HIV live with the very real threat of prosecution if they have sex without revealing their positive status – even if they use a condom.  And so they should, you may well argue. But the facts are these: the latest HIV medications are so powerful that they slash the viral load to negligible levels. That’s why people with HIV  now live long and productive lives. And that’s also why HIV is increasingly being thought of as a manageable condition like diabetes.

What’s more, medical treatment doesn’t just stop the virus in its tracks, it also stops it being transmitted to others. In a recent editorial, the medical journal, The Lancet reported on a major international research study which demonstrated that ‘anti-retroviral treatment can prevent the sexual transmission of HIV.’   Denmark’s parliamentarians have looked at the latest science and decided to suspend their legislation criminalizing people with HIV who have sex without disclosing their status.

But in the US and Canada we’ve seen a surge in prosecutions against people with HIV even as huge medical advances continue to be made. In the overwhelming majority of cases the HIV virus was not transmitted, nor likely to be, yet prison sentences of up to thirty years have been handed out by the courts. A guilty verdict doesn’t just mean a criminal conviction, it also means landing up on the sex offenders’ register along side rapists and paedophiles. In some states of America you can kill someone in a car accident and get a lighter sentence than if you fail to pass on HIV to a sexual partner. Passing on herpes or hepatitis C isn’t prosecuted, but not passing on HIV is.

The injustice is staggering. Seldom in my many years as a BBC journalist, and now as an international moderator, have I felt so outraged. If you were at the Regional Dialogue for HIV and the Law in Oakland, what did you think of how the day unfolded?

After helping  the CEO  polish up a speech, peppered with anecdotes, I was approached by two different teams wanting to flex their story telling skills too. Why? Well they’d seen how their CEO was using stories – rather than grandiose policy pronouncements – to get across complex business themes. And they wanted to have a go too. The results were surprising and immediate.

Even the skeptics (and there were a couple of obvious skeptics) quickly got the hang of it – and found powerful, unexpected examples from their own lives – which worked equally well in a business context.  The anecdotes featured confused Americans holidaying in France, an Indian in London whose bank account was hacked, the sensitive decision to set up a joint bank account after marriage… and many other intriguing tales. What they had in common was how a personal story set up and segued into a more complicated (sometimes off-putting) business message, in such a way that the main message became less ‘corporate’ and more memorable.

For the workshops’ participants the surprise was how easy it was – how animated and relaxed they felt when telling stories instead of  hammering out jargon-laden pronouncements. And the feedback from the group reinforced that  -  everyone could see how their colleagues came alive when bringing something of themselves into their corporate communications. The power of stories, we’ve been telling them since the start of time.

Never having used Twitter in this way before I had no idea what to expect. Now I’m a convert: it genuinely contributed to a fuller discussion and less random questioning. And besides, it was fun. Who else uses Twitter to field conference questions? What’s your experience?

The panel of elders – aka The Best -  comprised Sir James Mirrlees, economist and Nobel Laureate, who also gave the keynote address on the value of diversity; Prof Heinrich Rohrer, physicist, Nobel Laureate and stirrer of controversies – “diversity makes no difference to scientific innovation”; Lale Akgun, Turkish – German politician who called for the breaking of taboos and gave as good as she got – “there are no new ideas here”; from Boston, Lewis Feldstein, former civil rights activist and social activist, who surprised the students with academic research on diversity’s downside  – lower social inclusion – though it saddened him to do so; Daniel Thuerer, from the governing body of the International Red Cross, who discoursed on what can go wrong when diversity sets communities against each other; and business titan Eberhard von Koerber, former CEO of ABB, whose passionate plea, ‘Europe needs diversity for the sake of its own prosperity’ ended up being challenged by a young Czech participant, who posed: “Why should your growth happen at my country’s expense?”

Highlights for me: When an increasingly impatient young student, Sebastien, challenged Prof Rohrer’s unshakeable view that science did not need/nor benefit from diversity. If I were adjudicator I’d say Sebastien won that round. Another highlight: feisty international relations student Priya’s summaries of the weekend’s key ideas - a masterclass in  getting to the nub of the argument.  Also, an unexpected challenge from the floor to Prof Thuerer’s appeal that we should all view the world through African eyes – surely an unobjectionable ‘motherhoood and apple pie’ type statement? But no, it wasn’t allowed to just rest there as a soggy, emotional appeal, but was challenged – what about Rwanda, what about the persecution of gays? No soggy thinking allowed.

Were you at Challenge the Best 2011 – what were your top takeaways? And what about next year - any changes you’d like to see at Challenge the Best 2012?