I gave this talk at the Bay Area Ignite in January 2010.
It gives a great over view of what an unconference in the style I do is. All the other presenters at this Ignite evening were women and I took the opportunity to invite attendees to She’s Geeky the women’s only technology science, math and engineering conference that I founded that was next happening at the end of January.
I gave this talk several years ago at BayCHI. Human Interaction Design and Unconferneces
It gives an overview of what an unconference with photos of many of the key aspects.
There is a great post up by YABOU that summarizes my survey of unconference methods.
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My talk at BayCHI on Tuesday went really well. reinventnow: daily reinvention of who we are wrote about their experience. He talks about a pattern that did not make it out to the whole group. The fact that meeting people at conferences can lead one meet those people and then even to relocate to their cities. I posted over on my other blog about what we would do…here is that post.
First I will do picture filled “tour” of unconfernce processes and patterns for about 1/2 an hour and then answering some questions.
The irony of being asked to speak about designing unconferences is not lost on me because conferences have experts or distinguished speakers share their knowledge broadcast style to an audience. I decided that it would only be appropriate to do what happens at unconferences tap into the knowledge is in the room because the BayCHI community has been to many 100′s of events, conferences, workshops, meetings. They know more collectively then I do.
We will use the discovery process of Appreciative Inquiry to share the knowledge in the room about effective and inspiring process at conferences.
The audience will divide up into dyads and answer these questions:
Think of a time in your entire conference going experience, when have you felt most alive, most inspired and most proud. What was it that made it a high point? Please tell that story. Follow up question What seemed particularly effective or innovative?
Then we will gather in small groups of 6-10:
First tell each others story to the others in the group.
2. Merge lists of key qualities and circumstances of peak (un)conference going experiences.
3. Pick from this list the top two elements.
Then with the whole audience will hear from each group the key elements they found in their group.
BJ a Dialogue Mapper will capture the whole audience participation. I will collect the papers that have the merged list of each of the groups and will post them likely on the dCamp wiki.
I have been to OSCON for two years. Since my first event I have become more and more involved in different technical communities. Nonprofit Tech, Identity Gang, CivicSpace Drupal Developers/Businesses, and I have been to a lot of meetings as part of my participation in these communities. The opportunity to meet face to face is one that can often be rare and should be taken advantage of. I put together this proposal to support open source leaders who host face to face meetings to learn more about the process options available to them. I hope to cover at least 10 different ones. Here is a link to the workshop monday July 24th.
I am speaking about designing human interaction in unconferences at BayCHI next month May 9th. It will be fun. I am hoping to bring some other folks to share their thoughts too.
Technorati Tags: unconference, workshop
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Coming Full Circle – Cultivating Community
You know you have come full circle when…
In 2002-3 I was in the research phase of what became Integrative Activism – learning about networks, story telling, communities of practice. Sorting it all out – how they mapped to my communities needs and what it would be like to be strategic. I read Cultivating Communities of Practice by Richard McDermott, Ettienne Wenger and William Snyder. For me it became this keystone work for understanding theoretically and strategically what I was working on to to support community amongst leaders in spiritual activism and to foster connection amongst those showing up at workshops and retreats.
On Tuesday I spoke at the Community 2.0 Conference leading a panel on Community, Self Organization & Governance – Roles & Rules.
I talked about the experience of starting the identity community and the critical nature of both the DNA of the community – Who are the first people and how they interact with each other is critical. The rules and norms of the community will emerge out of that. The invitation and intention of the founders is also reflected in this early stage. At some point you can catalyse some self-reflection of the community to articulate the norms or principles of the community so they are more explicit and available for new people to get up to speed. I also talked about the huge value of face-to-face meeting opportunities to augment online communication – blogs, wikis, mailinglists, podcasts.
Afterwards – Richard McDermott came up to me and said he liked the panel and that it was clear to him that I really had done this work and liked what I had to say about it. Wow! That meant a lot to me.
Continuing on about the panel….
The panel included – Chris Carfi, Cerado; Chris Heuer, Brainjams and Chris Tolles, Topix.net.
Several other folks also thanked me for the panel. Apparently there was some audience discontent because we did not ‘answer’ the questions in the program. “What are THE rules?”, “What are THE roles?”, “How do you “GOVERN?” To me this was actually good because as Kathy Sierra has pointed out some people love you and some people hate you – mediocre sucks.
We turned the tables on the audience and asked them what their questions where. I saw the original frame for the panel:
and proposed it be changed – this was agreed to but not actually changed on the website or the program brochure (oops):
We had a great panel anyways – people asked these questions to get us going:
It was a great pleasure to share at the conference. I am hopeful about the spread of good face to face meeting process into this world. I think there is a link between this Community 2.0 world and Vendor Relationship Management that Doc is working on. I hope some folks will come to the Internet Identity Workshop.
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