Here is the punch line …

I have news for everyone who thinks they are going to an unconference or camp by going to Gov 2.0 Camp LA. They are going to a REGULAR CONFERENCE that happens to be organized at the last minute.

I was looking for:

• list of attendees who had signed up
• a clear articulation of the method(s) that would be used
• who would be facilitating
• a list of potential topics that registrants to the event had put forward as they registered

These are the things that I use to decide whether or not to attend an unconference event – not finding any of this information I decided not to plan to attend.

I looked at the website early on and couldn’t figure out how they were actually organizing the event.

• Would it be run as a Bar Camp where there isn’t a facilitator and people just sort of wander in and post sessions on a wall and there is no shared articulation of how people move through space. A weak closing with the energy just kinda fading off.
• Would it use “Open Space Technology” with a facilitator that supports the agenda creation process with everyone announcing their sessions to the whole room in the morning and explaining the principles of open space and law of 2 feet, encourage a range of formats including discussions about topics, and asking questions along with the usual fair of presentations. Open Space Technology also includes a closing where everyone shares highlights from the day.
• Would there be a documentation center to support intensive notes collection that is part of part of the Open Space Technology method or applied in a camp style format.
• Would it be a “pseudo-camp” where the organizers say it is a camp but then there is a pre-selection process of what sessions will happen. This can happen innocently enough by just putting up a wiki and saying we are scheduling the event ahead of time here on this wiki OR with organizers asking for proposals to be submitted and having them voted on.

Returning to the site I found what I feared would be the case it was a pseudo-camp there was a list of “speakers” this statement of how the agenda would be created.

Gov 2.0 LA is a camp-style unconference. Participants will shape the agenda. Rather than spend Camp time creating the agenda, we’re going to create it here, on this site. Here’s how. The Planning Committee has come up with themes around which sessions will be organized. They are:

• Language & Gov2.0
• Women in Technology
• Road Blocks & Barrier Breakers
• State & Local
• The Policy Pickle
• Community Care
• Gov2Gov
• Happy Campers

For each theme there was a page that described it with several good questions their is this statement:

If you would like to submit a speaker/panel submission, please describe what you will talk about, what organization you are representing, the format you are proposing, and how your proposal maps to the Camp themes. Creativity is encouraged!

All submissions for speakers/panels must be uploaded here no later than midnight EST on January 23, 2010. Voting by the Community and space availability will determine if your session is accepted. Voting closes at midnight EST January 30, 2010. The final Camp schedule will be posted no later than February 1, 2010.

The “committee” will then be making the schedule and posting on the site here.

I have news for everyone who thinks they are going to an unconference or camp they aren’t it is A REGULAR CONFERENCE that happens to be organized at the last minute.

It will be interesting to see if they do mix “unconference formats” (that is participant driven sessions developed on site in real time) with the formal regular conference pre-planning they have done.

If they parallel track these two styles it will not be good. Pre-planned and live-real-time the day of planned sessions can be mixed in an event but only if they are serialized – that is having “all” the pre-planned sessions in the morning and “all” the live-real-time the day of sessions in the afternoon.

Update: It seems they are not having any times/spaces for sessions to be proposed the day of the event live by the attendees. It is definitely ”just a conference”

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I am at Transparency Camp this weekend and there is much here that could be improved.

Better Agenda Creation and Space Creation

In creating the Transparency Camp agenda wall, no presenters announced their sessions (until the very end when given feedback, a few sessions got announced over the microphone). The session proposal process was not transparent to anyone but those located next to the agenda wall. Having proposers of sessions announce the name of the session, what their session is for (like technology or policy) helps everyone know what the presenter looks like, get a sense of who they are: their demeanor, voice and other non-verbal cues, as well as understand if the session might be interesting given the attendees goals. If presenters have similar ideas, or something to contribute to a session, those kinds of things can be sorted out in advance. People with similar interests and presentations may want to talk to each other ahead of time, ask questions and suggest things.

It is important once session leaders start by announcing their proposed session titles, one at a time, that the facilitator stay there to support the process – at the CLS event, the conference organizer literally left the room where people where announcing their sessions. This sort of left the group hanging and people felt a bit lost. By remaining right there, the facilitator is communicating that the session announcements are the most important thing happening at that moment.

Once many of the proposers have announced their session, the facilitator can invite those interested in topics they knew want need to be covered to come forward and propose a session in areas attendees haven’t yet thought of. This kind of prompting can also communicate that the topic area of the unconference needs help, and those who are tentative often do step forward to lead a discussion about a topic, even if they aren’t expert in it, just to make sure there is space for the topic.

I have heard people say that having people announce sessions takes to long. I don’t believe it does. I have never had an agenda creation process take more then 45 minutes and often it’s more like 25-30 minutes. A facilitator must make sure that people make brief announcements describing their session rather then speeches. But giving a fast demo of an announcement, the facilitator shows how the quick but effective announcement can be done without wasting time.

The facilitator should share with those gathered the Flocking Rules and Norms of Behavior for the day. Hopefully, whatever set of rules and norms the conference uses will be posted.

Personally I use the principles of Open Space and the One Law of Open Space. These are well known and “proven” having been used around the world at over 100,000 successful events.

By using the Open Space Flocking Rules, once the agenda is made, the facilitator doesn’t need to interrupt sessions to suggest it is time to move to the next one. Self organizing means presenters choose when and where to be and to manage their energy.

See the previous post on this blog that articulates in detail how to facilitate an unconference or camp agenda creation process.

Have More People

There could be more people attending Transparency Camp – the organizers closed registration relatively early and as per most free conferences about 40-50% of the people did not appear. On the first day, just over 100 people were here but the space here at Google would easily hold 300 people. Because the relatively small number of people for the space feels empty, it seemed wasteful of the opportunity.

One thing I heard was that the organizers kept the Transparency Camp small to facilitate relationship formation amongst this small group, but if that was the goal (having a limit of 100 people) then the camp should be convened in a space that works for 100 people, not 300.

Use the Space Better

Transparency Camp is not using the full range of break out spaces. Google is providing 6 very small break out rooms available for meetings plus the big main space (Charlie’s cafe).

The big main space could be broken up into about 6 different break out spaces. The tables outside could be listed as spaces.

Have more Breakout Sessions

For an unconfernece supporting as many breakouts as needs to happen is important.

Unconferences should support as many breakouts as needs to happen. Transparency Camp limited the number sessions per time slot to 7 and it was mostly “full,” meaning there may be more energy to have more sessions.

Yes, there will be a lot of parallel sessions which people want to be at during the same times, however, if you support and promote extensive note taking this anxiety can be lessened. If leaders arbitrarily limit the number of breakouts to say 7, but there is enough interest and energy to have 10-12, then those who didn’t find room to call a session on their topic will take the energy they have for “that thing” to be discussed/presented into other people’s session topics and be somewhat disruptive. The moderator should never be proactively merging sessions. Session participants should work this out during the announcing session.

All people who want to lead a session should be free to propose it and they all should be putting their names on the session paper they are calling. If people feel two or three topics are similar and ought to be merged, they can find the people who proposed those two sessions and “lobby them” to merge sessions. This is a self-organizing process in that the people hosting/convening a session get to decide if they want to merge or not.

Have a Documentation Center

Transparency Camp didn’t seem to have a clear idea of how to document sessions. At professional community unconferences, I always work with a person who’s only job is to collect and track session documentation and get it up online quickly. I will be working with my usual helper to write up detailed instructions on how to run a documentation center to share with the community. But here is an example of good documentation from the last two Internet Identity Workshop. 2009a, 2008b.

Have an Opening and Closing

Opening and Closing circles for an event are key elements that were left out of Transparency Camp. This is where I would position it in the room.

I led a session today about how to do amazing unconferences, the 4th time I’ve led a session like this at an unconference in the last couple months. Here is an example of the way I think about articulating the over all flow of the day – converging and diverging the groups energy.

The facilitator and organizing team help develop and maintain the flow of energy in an event – by coming from the outside world – together into a circle – where agenda creation happens. The community diverges amongst itself via the sessions throughout the day, then comes back together again at the end – converging in an ending circle to share what happened during the breakouts sessions (divergent time).

Post – Event

Ideally, the schedule, after a closing circle, will then give people a break to have a shower at their hotel or just go for a walk – before convening a dinner or an “after event.” I am also a huge believer in supporting people eating together to build community and buying everyone dinner supports this kind of convergence. Then after dinner everyone disburses back to their homes/hotels.

It’s very important for the event organizers to attend these after events. Transparency camp didn’t appear to have it’s organizers attending the evening event after the first day, held in a local restaurant. So while many attendees were there, without the event organizers, the evening felt a bit abandoned, as though the organizers were too busy or otherwise gathered at more exclusive events. But supporting the social evening event is just as key as the other recommendations I have made above.

I work with my clients (typically organizations in technical fields trying to solve problems and build community) to navigate the landscape of choices when designing an event. It is important as an event organizer, convening organization to understand why they are convening an event and to understand why attendees want to participate/attend the event. Answering these questions allows the convening organization to be able work with a process designer/facilitator like me to sculpt the processes used during the convening.   Unconferences if done well can serve in supporting innovation, solving hard problems and bring people together in community. If done poorly they waste people’s time and do limited good.

UPDATE: Mary Hodder has an excellent post with her observations about Transparancy Camp and how it can be improved.

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Last September I took a training with the founder of Innovation Games Luke Hohmann (to be a game facilitator) and it was amazing set of fun “games” to play with the users/customers of one’s products. Quite different then a focus group in terms of the kind of information that you get about how to shape/design your products. (wikipedia article – details all 12 games and information about selecting the appropriate game)

I know what you are asking how is playing games going to help with my products, workplace or process. I wondered this too….here is a simple example.

I explained one of them (Buy a Feature) this way at the Online Community Unconference – say you have a next generation set of features to build for your product – you have 10 potential features but only time to build a few of them – how do you prioritize/decide about which ones to put in the next release?

Buy a Feature is a game you can play to do this (and it is both online and face to face)

You bring in 10 current customers together and give them each $200 of play money. You give each of your features a cost totaling $3000-$4000 (one might be $100 (really easy to build) $500 (harder/more time) etc.) They must amongst themselves figure out how to spend their $2000 to buy a limited set of the 10 features. You could play this with several sets of customers and then gather information about what they want. It helps you make decisions about what to build AND it is fun for them to play the game of “buying” the features they want.

The conference is not limited to “just” innovation games but also includes other design and “serious” games.

• Design games: Offering collaborative design activities within a game format improves idea generation and communication among stakeholders. By shifting focus to the game, power relations and other factors that might hamper idea generation, are downplayed

• Serious games: Ranging from theater improvisation to interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors, serious games have uses in education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change

You don’t have to be an expert to attend – if you are just exploring these things we invite you along.

There have been a few companies in the identity space that have used these tools – I just can’t say who.

I am also happy to talk with folks if they are interested in using games to innovate and do better product design in the identity and social web space.

Here is the book if you are interested in learning more.

“Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play” (Luke Hohmann)

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An article was written in the Boston Globe this week Tech Leaders Hope “unConference” will inspire entrepreneurs I was interviewed by the reporter Rob Weisman on Friday. They did a good job of talking about Open Space Technology – however it came off as if it was all “me”. Sigh.

For the unConference, the Massachusetts technology group has tapped a Berkeley, Calif.-based professional facilitator, Kaliya Hamlin, who has run about 50 similar events worldwide, mostly on the West Coast. Hamlin, known as “Identity Woman” for her work in the movement to enable a single log-on for all websites, promotes gatherings based around “open space technology” with no preset agendas.

“Whoever comes are the right people,” she said, summarizing her philosophy. “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. And whenever it’s over, it’s over.”

Whether such a free-flowing approach can work in tradition-bound Massachusetts remains to be seen. But interest is heavy. Hopcroft said the council is “oversubscribed” on experts and already has fielded 85 applications from entrepreneurs for scholarships.

I shared about the history of the Open Space Technology and how Harrison Owen invented it 20+ years ago and lives in Camden Main. Apparently this blew his whole story line that this was “new” to New England.

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I really respect the long term engagement that Forum One has had in this space – convening events about online community for over 8 years – yes this was before “Web 2.0″ existed. They support a community of professional online community managers and companies who have online communities as part of their businesses coming together that rich and deep one.

This is how they describe the event:

The Online Community Unconference is a gathering of online community practitioners – managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors – to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.

Those involved in online community development (and social software in general) share many common challenges: community management, tools, marketing, business models, legal issues. As we have found with our past events, the best source of information on all of these challenges is other knowledgeable practitioners.

They have a great unconference FAQ.

I will be facilitating and also convening a session about the emerging identity tools similar to the one that I gave at Net Squared last week along with talking about the proposal being put forward about relationships being nodes not just edges.

If you are a ‘face to face’ facilitator kinda person but want to explore what is going online with people and groups this would be a great friendly place to come and explore.

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I am excited for the morning session – should be interesting how that conversation sparks ideas for sessions. I hope there is enough room – with 300 people expected and only 10 spaces for 4 sessions. We shall see.

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The Open Space sessions really didn’t work at DefragCon. If only Kaliya were there.

The thing is I was asked early on by Eric to participate in facilitating the event. I said yes tentatively. I lost interest when I learned that it had basically been fully designed by Eric already and that the Open Space would be interspersed with programmed sessions. I said up front I didn’t think this design would work. It ended up being like one hour a day too – way to small an amount of time to ‘have it work’.

I have a good instinct about conference design and how to weave open space with pre-schedulled sessions. This is why people pay me to help them do this well. The conference I ran last week in NY for technology managers at independent schools – I had many folks say it was the best conference they had ever been to.

My advice is to keep the pre-programmed sessions to a minimum. Under 1/4 – 1/5 of a conference total time. These pre-programmed times need to happen before the open space time. So you go from more structured to less structured. DeFrag was maybe 10% open space – not enough time for the energy to emerge and bubble up. There is such a strong temptation to enclose open space with pre-defined speakers and topics so ‘bosses will know what will be said ahead of time’ so they will feel ‘safe’ sending their staff there. I guess this is true when you have a price point well over $1000.

COMMENT FROM ARRON:
Don’t get me wrong. I thought the event was great. The problem with the OpenSpace sessions was there just wasn’t enough time. It would have helped if someone was more actively involved in facilitating and summarizing too. I thought the DataSharingSummit was great b/c you did an excellent summary and you were very active in eliciting participation. Let it be known that I thought Eric did an amazing job at putting this conference together and was working the crowd to get more people involved. DefragCon was wonderful. More only comments are: the OpenSpace sessions could have been allotted more time and I think because it was so spread it out was hard to get the same level of interactivity. Moreover, they could have used more active facilitation to summarize, etc.

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It’s also a little bit about how much wasted effort there is in our field, tremendously talented people consistently trying to reinvent the wheel because they don’t know about other colleagues, conferences, and consortia.

We all got excited about unconferences a few years ago (http://www.unconference.net/). But unconferences interfere with the whole ‘let’s meet in the bar after sessions’ scenario that is so important for greasing the skids in our world.

Holly, what unconferences have you been to? The events I produce have a lot of great ‘at the bar after sessions’ time. In fact they tend to be better and richer because people are energized from their day rather then drained from being talked ‘at’ all day. I invite you to come to one of my events and enjoy the bar after sessions. In fact the topic that would be the one discussed after at the BAR can become a session in open space.

Jennifer Trant asked me to speak at the closing of Museums and the Web about identity. and like most talking heads events the topics were interesting, the format was boring (granted I was at this one for a day and they did slightly more interactive things on the other days). This is the kind of event it would be great to ‘unconference’… You can still do all the juried papers and have them “published.” Folks who want to present their papers are free to do so in the open space format…and you can talk about lots of other stuff directly related to the work at hand too. The wisdom of discerning what is relevant to be talked about in the hands the attendees not the committee that has to decide who is in and who is out.

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I went to the Unitarian Universalists General Assembly page to check out how they are including Open Space. They have this two pager about Open Space (pdf). At first glance it would seem to be a good explanation and could work if that was the major activity for afternoon. Then I went to see what the agenda like and I really wonder how it will work.

They are introducing Open Space to the GA during a plenary on Thursday. However they have a fully pre-programed 10+ breakout schedule competing with each proposed open space sessions. So if I had never heard of Open Space before – what would I do? Likely go through the program mailed to you in the weeks ahead of time and decide which of the 10 breakouts I want to go to then will I really check the open space agenda to see if one of the session is interesting enough for me to attend instead of the breakout I already chose based on the paragraph long description.

What seems like happened was some people proposed Open Space and those organizing it said sure – ok we can have that happen on the side but we have to do our regularly programmed content because we understand that and so does everyone else. I don’t get the “domain” part of what they are proposing either.
There is a blog up for covering the Open Space sessions at the GA we shall see how it works.

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Books:

• Harrison Owen’s Open Space a Users Guide
• Creating a LIfe Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities
• Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today’s Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems Change. with 61 methods (including the ones listed below)

Organizations/Conferences:

• National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (they have a book too if you become a member)
• Canadian Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (their conference is coming up in the fall).

Methods:

• Technology of Participation
• Future Search
• Dynamic Facilitation
• World Cafe
• Appreciative Inquiry

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