Haven’t heard of an “unconference“? Then you’re in the majority, but the growing unconference community, mostly on the west coast, and mostly in the web development community, may be wondering why there aren’t more unconferences, and fewer traditional conferences.
I have to be honest – I’m new to the term “unconference” so I had to do some digging research. Most of the unconferences I found take place in Southern California, which may explain why we’re relatively immune to them up here in New England. But I love the idea. In fact, some of the aspects of an unconference are precisely what I recently spoke about at Exhibitor 2007.
An unconference is a conference inside-out. For starters, the content is dictated by the attendees rather than the conference organizers and speakers. This is typically facilitated through an online wiki where prospective attendees can openly shape the focus of the event. Then, the sessions are basically open-format brainstorming among the attendees rather than a lecture by a speaker or a panel. According to Wikipedia, this format is pretty much the same as Open Space Technology – a meeting format pioneered over 20 years ago. But whether you call it unconference or O.S.T., this idea’s time may have finally arrived. It is to conferences what Web 2.0 is to the internet – a paradigm shift in the direction content flows and the role the audience plays. Like Web 2.0, an unconference gets it’s content from it’s users, and users are free to voice their opinions about the content, the agenda, or the entire notion of the event. More importantly, users are free to take away what they can from these events – typically immensely valuable ideas and networking connections. Call it Conference 2.0, I guess.
In my session at Exhibitor, which was called “Building Larger and More Connected Audiences – Online and Onsite”, I talked about using Blogs and other web tools to allow meeting organizers to share the discussion points with their audience in advance, and give the audience a chance to react and voice opinions and ideas. This alignment process would make every meeting more effective for audience and speaker alike. I believe this is the very least meeting organizers need to do in order to accomodate web2.0 audiences at their event. Give them a voice.
Unconferences will clearly never replace conferences. But conference organizers may serve their audiences well to incorporate lessons from the unconference into their conference planning. Folks who attend unconferences speak loudly about how much more they get out of unconferences than from conferences. A conference may need to engage their audience early and communicate more than just the goals and objectives of a meeting but the content itself. After they have given their audience a chance to adjust the content to best suit their needs, conference organizers may want to schedule one or more sessions in the O.S.T. format, perhaps even using the term “unconference” if they want geek cred, in order to support those attendees who want an open format to collaborate and generate totally new ideas.
Here are those references I promised:
Wikipedia Definition of Unconference and O.S.T
CNN, Why “unconferences” are fun conferences
Kaliya Hamlin’s Blog, unconference
An article from Dave Winer’s Blog, Scripting News Annex