The first is the Internet Identity Workshop: http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/ October 18-20, 2011 in Mountain View, CA.

The second is Friday, October 28th, 2011 in Boston, MA for the Mass Technology Leadership Council:  http://www.masstlc.org.

Two different events and two sides of the country. If you’ve been thinking about running an unConference, we invite you to come on out and watch us work. Contact us, or leave us a comment for more information.

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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.

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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:

Through a set of discussions in this session we will take a closer look at the social infrastructure that needs to be in place to ensure successful communities. What is the role of anonymity? How do you define identities? Do you create roles? What rules need to be in place?

and proposed it be changed – this was agreed to but not actually changed on the website or the program brochure (oops):

How do you seed communities? How can you build shared identity and meaning in community? How do you scale – when do rolls and rules come into play? How do communities govern themselves? What tools help build “social infrastructure” help communities thrive?

We had a great panel anyways – people asked these questions to get us going:

• Should rules be flexible, or carved in stone?
• What are the implications of anonymous community members?
• What are different governance models?
• What is the time and/or human resource involved in community management?
• When to post the terms prominently? And when to bury them?
• How do advertisers get involved?
• What about conflict resolution?
• Our industry (pharma) is highly regulated. How do we do this?
• Should the rules be member-defined?
• How do you seed a community, and how does it scale?
• What kills community?
• Should communities be online, offline, or both?
• What are the skills needed to be a moderator?

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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Kaliya defined unconferences as lying between a conference with a structured agenda and a cocktail party – this is where unconferences live. She outlined the important elements of a successful unconference:

The invitation and how it is framed, the wiki where ideas and tentative plans can be posted, as well as a list of who will be there (it has been amazing to see the list grow for DCamp), and the welcoming on the actual day. Kaliya gave examples of having public sign-in lists, big, sometimes illustrated. Name-tags are essential because identity is essential. Activities that have worked in the past have included having attendees represented by their caricature, and having people bring or develop logo’s related to their work.

The opening session is an important element too, and have in the past included rapid-fire intros, gathering together in a circle (no matter how many people), and using introductory games.

For agenda creation, Kaliya described how BarCamp, Brain Jams, and Mind Camp have all had folks stick their ideas up on white paper walls. Postit notes have been used at Open Space Technology, Internet Identity Workshop, Recent Changes Camp, and Mashup Camp. Agenda development is often done through public discussion – descriptions of what the agenda topic is and questions and answers around that. At this point topics get added to the agenda, and topics merge, and split etc. Wiki’s are used for archiving the schedule and subsequently the content that is generated during the event.

Sessions tend to involve activity, team work, and discussion. People need to be participating and learning, and like being a successful mentee – participants must drive the learning and make sure that they are in the right space to learn. To fuel all this, plenty of food (geek and otherwise) is an essential part of any unconference.

Unconferences do not have traditionally keynotes typically, or typical plenary sessions, though there is usually a closing circle where the highlights are shared etc.

Kaliya talked through lots of other interesting techniques and activities that have been used at these sort of gatherings:

o Interview and Sculpt – for creating an agenda for an unconference of 40 people or less. This is a time-consuming technique that works through the participants being interviewed prior to the event, and then an agenda being developed using the gathered data.

o Speed Geeking – like speed dating; but speed geeking! Essentially moving from project to project.

o Podcasting – to take the conversation outside of the event.

o World Cafe – lots of cafe tables, each table of people has the same question and they work on it with discussions and sketches etc. then after about 20 minutes one person from that table moves to the next. Interesting way that ideas and conversations develop.

o Dynamic Facilitation – where the facilitator supports the flow of conversations and charts concerns, data, problem-solving, and solutions.

o Spectrogram – where a semi-controversial question is asked and participants are instructed to spread (physically / spatially) depending upon their views. Then people are interviewed publicly about their perspective.

(Other techniques include Appreciative Inquiry, Collective Maps….)

During the evening we got a great taster of one of the kinds of activities that can take place at an unconference. Kaliya facilitated an activity where we got together in pairs to interview each other for 5 minutes each about our conference going experience, and when we had felt most alive, inspired, and proud. Subsequently we joined into groups of 6 and retold the stories of our partners to the larger group, pulling out the shared elements of what makes us feel alive, inspired, and proud at conferences. The results of this exercises can be seen on the Dialogue Map that was made using Compendium software.

Now I’m feeling more prepared for DCamp – see you there!

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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.

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