Undoing it

I went to an Unconference yesterday. An Unconference is not a non-conference, and it's not an anti-conference. It is sort of like a combination of a conference with a Quaker Meeting.

The biggest difference from a regular conference is the format: there's no structure, no sessions planned, no speakers, nothing conferency like that until everyone shows up that morning and creates it.

The only thing that exists ahead of time is the topic. In this case it was "Green Innovation for Business."

We and about 150 people all showed up at 9am with no idea how we would be spending the day. The process then went like this: everyone there did a 15 second self-introduction, we talked for about 10 min in small groups about things that would be interesting to have a session on, and then whoever felt so inclined wrote out a session topic on a piece of paper and put it up on the wall in one of the ~40 session slots (there was time for four one-hour sessions across 10 rooms)

This, now, was the agenda for the day. The person who put up the topic was the session moderator.

We each looked at the wall, picked out which sessions we wanted to go to, and off we went. If people showed up for a session, then it would happen. If no one showed up, then it wouldn't. If you got bored halfway through you were encouraged to leave. Vote with your feet - make it relevant to yourself.

If the conversation came to a natural end before the end of the allotted hour, then people would head off and either join other sessions or just hang out until the next round of sessions started. If a session needed more time, it could continue indefinitely until the group was satisfied.

There were plenty of other collaborative tools to support the event as well. In each session someone would volunteer to take notes and upload them to the unconference wiki, which becomes a central collaboration and discussion space following the conference. People also volunteered in each session to take notes on flip charts and then put them up on a large wall that by the end of the day was full of interesting ideas, with clear themes starting to emerge.

It was a great day and I left feeling very un-satisfied.