• unConferencing: How to prepare to attend an unConference.

Organizing An Unconference? look at these posts:

• Open Space, what happens, why does it work.
• How to DIY Unconference
• Introduction to Open Space for ITU-T – slide show and 4 page PDF
• Unconferences and Money
• How to Facilitation Agenda Creation Step by Step
• If it has a pre-set agenda it is not an unConference
• Questions about Unconferences

unConference Methods:

• UnPanel – Fishbowl Dialogue
• Uncovering diverse opinions – Spectrogram
• Community Mapping
• Ice Breaker – A strong wind blows
• Introductions for 200 in 10 min - how to

My Reviews of unConferences:

• Making Transparency Camp Better

Media Coverage of unConferences:

• Welcome to the Unconference:Why more industry associations and trade groups are letting members organize their own free-form “unconferences”. Inc Magazine December ’09/January ’10 Print Edition. This covers an event that Kaliya designed and facilitated for the Mass Technology Leadership Council.
• Cover of Convene Magazine, December 2008
• Mashup Camp in the San Jose Mercury News
• Marketplace (radio show) Convers Unconferences (badly)
• Where the Next Steve Jobs will be – at an unconference? on Biz 2.0 blog
• (Gender Biased) Newsweek Article on Unconferences

Learn more about Kaliya’s work

• Design and Facilitation – Event Services

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I am not saying you can’t “pre-plan anything” or be “unorganized”.
* You could have a keynote speaker to open or close your day that is planned ahead. (like the closing of the first day of Mashup Camp 1 had Peter Hirshburg give the BEST speech ever on the history of computer marketing – it was educational and very funny)
* You could know you are going to do a world cafe to close a day about a certain topic.
* You should have some onramp material with several speakers to open your multi-day event about a technical topic (as we do at the Interenet Identity Workshop).
* You can decide your speed geeking is going to happen after lunch on the 2nd day.
* You can ask everyone who registers what they want to present about or hope to learn about and then post all of that back to potential attendees.

In short, lots of your conference can get outlined in advance – that is “organized”. If you are actually putting people into an agenda with times and spaces and speaking slots, THEN YOU ARE DOING A REGULAR CONFERENCE – so don’t call it an unconference.

PodCamp “the new media community unconference” has a cultural practice of setting the agenda ahead of time and calls itself – IT just disqualified itself by doing an agenda.

Why do organizers do this? I have heard from organizers like those doing Sex 2.0 that they have to have the agenda planned months in advance so that the people coming from far away “know what they are getting”. This logic is patently false.

The Internet Identity Workshop that I facilitate has professional technical people get on airplanes from both Europe and Asia just to attend – the attraction is the live, made there that day agenda.

At the unmoney convergence that I convened and facilitated we were expecting mostly a west coast crowd – we were stunned that many people from across the country – some as far as Newfoundland, Canada came. Four came from overseas, Japan, Austraila, Germany and the UK specifically for the conference (They didn’t tag coming to our event with some other reason they happened to be here). They came BECAUSE it was created by the people attending live. This in itself is appealing to people. I hope that organizers can begin to understand this more.

You can let the people make the agenda live and still have a conference where people come from far away.
* If you write a compelling invitation – a reason to come together, articulate key thematic areas that will be covered,
* if you ask people what they want to talk about and hope to hear about and post this,
* if you list attendees who have signed up.
* if you have a few – VERY few speakers set ahead of time that is less then 1/4 of the conference time.

People want the space to have critical conversations about key things they care about. This is what makes unconferences so powerful. I ask organizers to please consider and respect this about them and NOT use the word unconference to describe events that make their agendas in advance.

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I am quoted several times in The Power of UN article.

Plus, they’re inevitable. It’s simply a given that the increased interactivity of the workplace will show up in the conference space, said Kaliya Hamlin, who in November was named to Fast Company’s list of the 13 most influential women in Web 2.0. Hamlin, “chief process officer” of Process Geeks, has facilitated more than 50 unconferences over the last three years, in high-tech as well as more traditional settings. She expects that interactive methods such as the unconference will disrupt the “groove that meeting planners have been in forever” of scheduling speakers and presentations six to nine months out, and creating meetings where the real work actually gets done during coffee breaks. Hamlin is a critic of traditional conferences – not because she discounts the value of meetings, but because she believes passionately in their potential to solve problems.

“I think there is a lot of uncertainty on the part of conference organizers who feel they have to have a preplanned agenda,” Hamlin said, “so that people will invest their time” in traveling to a conference. But it’s a mistake to think that keynotes are what bring people to a conference. “What is really valuable is the face time for conversations about critical issues and emerging developments,” Hamlin said. “Community is what brings people together. Supporting community interactivity is what gives conferences value.”

Interactive methods will work for anybody, Hamlin said, but they “must map to the way that professional communities interact with each other.” It’s a matter of trusting the facilitator or meeting designer to meet a community where it is culturally, she said.

In instances where Hamlin helps organizations incorporate unconference methods where they are unfamiliar, she often suggests that one traditional day of programming be followed by a day in which participants organize the content. Her clients often love the open-space day and find that experiencing them lessens their appetites for traditional conferences. “They like them a lot less,” Hamlin said, “and consider them to be ineffective.”

Open space is an awesome tool to use to deal with complexity, she said. “Magic happens in terms of collective understanding and breakthoughs.”

What is kind of amazing about this coverage is that I also was highlighted this month in Fast Company as one of the Most Influential Women in Technology for my other career in Identity. I wrote this article for them about the women working in user-centric digital identity with me.

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The camp movement has been a really inspiring one and in some ways quite utopian. “Just throw it together and it will happen”. Unconferences, just like conferences, require work in the form of time to put on and resources in the form of money to provide for them.

Events are not Free
I don’t believe in “free” events because if an event costs nothing to sign up for it costs nothing to not show to. In the past several “camps” that I was involved with facilitating have had upwards of 50% no-show rates. It is almost impossible to buy food and provision space if you don’t know how many people are coming to an event. The cost should be very reasonable and in paying a fee the attendee makes a contract with the organizer to actually attend. Via the transaction, the organizer makes a contract with the attendee to provide food, physical space and good organization/facilitation.

I like to think of unconferences as basically 10x cheaper then regular technology conferences and 10x better.

Why 10x cheaper?
Many Technology Conferences cost between $1000 and $2000 to attend. Yep this is a normal price range for a regular ticket at a conference.
* JavaOne – $2,590.00, conference+ | $1,795.00 regular conference
* RSA security conference – $3,995 conference+ | $2,195 regular conference
* Hot Chips Symposium on high performing chips – $815
* ETech – $1690 conference+ | $1390 regular conference
* Web 2.0 – $1745 conference+ |$1445 regular conference

One reason is that many of these these events are for-profit, they are trying to make money and lots of it off convening the event. Another reason is that a coffee break at these events can cost $15 per person to provide and a meal upwards of $60 per person per meal – yes, that bad conference food you ate at your last event cost the organizer that much. These events have costs associated with complimentary passes for speakers, press, analysts etc. These costs are born by the other attendees.

Why 10x Better?
The best part of many conferences are the coffee breaks – they are the interactions with the people. Why pay $1000s of dollars when the best parts are in the lobby? It kinda makes more sense to just make the “way of the lobby” be the way the whole conference works. Open Space Technology -the facilitated method that we use for She’s Geeky- was invented over 20 years ago. It supports the emergence of incredible peer to peer learning opportunities and vibrant discussions. You leave the day full of amazing new ideas and conversations with amazing women. It is totally worth the approximately $10 an hour of conference. I would be very surprised if you don’t come away with knowledge and contacts that are in the long run worth many more times that.

Why any cost at all?
The way of the lobby is not zero cost though – the venue costs multiple thousands of dollars and so does food for 200 women. We also have a coffee barista coming both days so you can have fresh espresso. There is a time cost to organizing and logistics that requires money for compensation.

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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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• Trade Show Booths – Type your industry niche in Google – visit the websites, do your research
• Papers – read them beforehand
• Presentations of Paper – watch them on YouTube
• PPT Presentations – watch them on Slideshare
• Get a sense of someone – Read their blog and check out their Flickr stream
• Panel presentations – read a good blog conversation about the subject you are interested in

Face time with other people IS really valuable, rare and expensive. Having meaningful conversations, getting advice from peers and tackling challenging issues is something that is good use of time. Using methods that are structured but leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” gathered are what unconferences are about.

After attending the Internet Retailer Conference and the Online Community Unconference 2007 last week, I’m really seeing the amazing value that Unconferences offer. They have the right people in the room and I’ve found them to be tremendously valuable as a dialogue of sharing rather than the one-way communication of traditional trade events. It’s very much reflective of Web 2.0. If you haven’t been to one before, try one.
-Web 2.0 business by James Key Lim

When I design, facilitate and produce an unconference 80-90% of the time at the event will be spent in open space and the other 10-20% of the time will be spent with other large group participatory processes that help meet the gathered community meet its goals. These include Fishbowls, Spectrograms, cafe dialogue processes, Appreciative Inquiry, Marketplace of Ideas, Value Network Mapping, Polarity Management, Visual Journalism/Graphic Recording, and shared community maps.

This slide presentation shows both Open Space and other formats and goes with a 4 page PDF describing how Open Space is used in the communities I regularly facilitate. There is another presentation on human interaction design and unconferences. I recently wrote a piece called Unconferencing that describes how to ‘prepare’ to be at one.

I consult with organizations, companies, conference producers and community leaders helping them design effective unconferences. Recently I helped the Gates Foundation plan for an upcoming meeting of their Global Libraries Program. I also facilitate events a range of events that both I and others produce (a list of all my past facilitations is in the sidebar).

I specialize in bringing networks together that over time can innovate in complex environments. I have been leading the convening of the user-centric identity community since its inception. We are working on building the next layer of the internet – the identity layer. Our 6th major event coming up in May.

Since I began leading unconferences in the tech world I have expertise in how to use community web tools to complement the processes both before during and after.
I hope you enjoy the site, please contact me if you have questions about unconference or my consulting services. Kaliya (at) mac (dot) com

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She’s Geeky got mainstream press coverage. We were in the San Jose Mercury News on the front page of the biz-tech section (I just saw the paper version today). There are lots of great notes up about the event.

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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 haven’t been to an unconference as of this posting and I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Are they really as great as people say? Or is it just hype because it’s something new?

To start off with the format of ‘unconference’ that you are referencing is at Corporate Communications and the Social Media Revolution. It is using a format that is quite challenging to actually do well.

Ragan has recruited Social Media guru Shel Holtz to chair the event and act as one of the discussion leaders. Think of these leaders as researchers who have been given the task of writing a report based on the knowledge in the room.

Let’s take the topic: “How do I get my CEO to write a blog that is personal and honest?”

The discussion leader will immediately call on those in the room who have already done this and ask them to explain. Meanwhile, Ragan will use interactive brainstorming technology to post tips, tactics and strategies on a screen as the day unfolds.

The format of rooms of 50-200 people with a ‘discussion leader’ that is pre-chosen and the topic areas are generated by the audience or that are ‘pre-chosen.’ I personally don’t think they are that different than talking heads conferences, and depending on the style of facilitation, can be more frustrating. If they organize breakout rooms and help people make the agenda in the morning, they can be amazing events.
Unconferences are really great when you have a good invitation – a clear purpose or inspiring reason that is attracting people to the event. Supernova Open Space was good but it wasn’t ‘great’ because the topic was very broad and the organizers did not really promote it as part of the ‘main’ event.

Several people who attended both said they enjoyed the Open Space day more then the talking heads conference part of Supernova. Unconferences are particularly great if you have someone taking care of holding the space well. This is details around the event by ensuring people’s needs are met for food, liquid nourishment and physical comfort.

First of all, the unconference is totally free. Really? OK, what’s the catch? Turns out only the first day is free – then they “hope you stick around” for the $795 conference that follows the next two days. Guess there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

First of all, unconferences are not by default “free.” There are many costs to bringing people together in large groups (venue, food, facilitation, supplies, hotel for the organizers, AV etc.). This can be covered by the participants themselves through a fee (granted this is at A LOT lower cost then traditional conferences, usually 5-15x lower) or by sponsors. Getting sponsors takes a lot of effort on the part of the organizers and can create sponsor fatigue. Just getting participants to pay something can make the model more sustainable. A friend of mine who put on a weekend unconference that he did not charge for ended up $3000 out of pocket. If he had charged something, he would have had a better handle on the number of attendees AND he would have had some money left over to cover unforeseen expenses that sponsors’ money didn’t cover.

The Internet Identity Workshop and the Online Community Unconference both are events that had very strong invitations and communities that they were reaching. They have a reasonable fee (anyone whose job it is to pay attention to or work in those fields has no problem paying the cost to attend). The organizers of both are committed to letting those for whom the cost is an issue attend. They also both had sponsors.

Next, the audience helps prepare the agenda. Two weeks before the event registrants will receive a survey to help shape the agenda and choose topics. Does this really work?

I am not sure what unconferences you are talking about that actually ‘set’ the agenda ahead of time online (perhaps PodCamp?). This makes for a regular talking heads conference without the benefit of organizer curation. What does work really well is attendees or potential attendees putting forward topic ideas ahead of time on the wiki. Then the day of the conference, they make the agenda together in the opening session using Open Space Technology. I use a grid on the wall with times along the side and spaces along the top and then the individuals come forward, write their session topic on a 8×11 paper, their name and then announce to the audience their topic and then post it on the wall.

Finally, it’s promoted as an idea exchange and brainstorming session. No boring lectures. Instead, a question will be posed and the “wisdom of the crowd” will answer it based on their collective knowledge. Sounds utopian. Wouldn’t chaos ensue if “everyone’s a speaker”?

Using open space technology everyone ‘can be’ a speaker, but in practice about 1/4 – 1/3 of attendees put sessions on the agenda. They do a range of things from giving a talk for 1/2 an hour, demoing their product, posing a problem they have and seek answers, or hosting a conversation about a burning question. You can think of these as a peer-to-peer learning environment.

Andrea in the comment asks this question: can this translate to an executive audience?

YES! if you have a facilitator with experience who is working with the conveners to ensure that the space is created in alignment with the cultural norms of the executive. Your production values for space and food must match that audience and therefore the price is not free.

The internet Identity Workshop has top people at Microsoft (Chief Identity Architect), Liberty Alliance (Executive Director), top people from Sun Microsystems, CA, Oracle, AOL, and other companies. It is a working tech conference, however. Recently I flew out to AOL and led an unconference that senior architects participated in. I was at TED 2005 and there was so much amazing brain power in the audience all sitting listening to presentations. I wonder what it would be like if they supported the audience making their own conference. David Hornik is trying an format called “The Lobby” with a $4,000 price point – so if you are attending you are an executive. I am curious what format they are choosing to use besides milling in the lobby.

One downfall, posted by blogger Kaliya Hamlin, is the gender bias she experienced. “I am ‘the woman’ doing the more feminine role of facilitation – a key part of what actually makes an unconference run was made invisible in the [BusinessWeek] article.”

I find it interesting the way my commentary on the Business Week article was put forward as a downfall of the event when it was really just a critique of media coverage of the phenomena, not the phenomena itself and specifically the writer of the Business Week article. The producers of the Online Community Unconference were very grateful for my help and fully ‘saw me’ to the attendees at all of my events. The article had a challenge.

Having said that womens’ attendance at BarCamps and other very geeky unconferences is an issue, I think this is in part because the ‘rules of barcamp‘ are not particularly welcoming and usually those communities don’t emphasize the art and practice of invitation.

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So I’m intrigued by the idea of Unconferencing. There is a reason why people like conferences with a lot of unscheduled time between sessions, and why the hallway discussions are frequently more animated than the discussions in the conference rooms. Some people believe it’s because the quality of speakers is inadequate (specifically because they lack the ability to make complex, important subjects understandable and interesting), but I’m inclined to believe it’s more because most people get more value out of one-on-one and small-group conversations with both peers and experts, where they get to discuss the issues and get answers in the context of their particular situation. This is the same reason that students often get much more value out of personal coaching than they do from listening to lectures.

hat has changed the equation substantially is the sheer amount of free reading material that’s available online on just about any imaginable subject. The self-initiated learner can now often learn more in an hour’s online research than in an hour listening to the most profound and articulate expert. And while some don’t have the skill or interest in doing such research, and are willing to pay money to hear someone step them through something they could teach themselves for free in the same time, the freeing of information has raised expectations and lowered the satisfaction of many audiences with formal conference presentations and panels.

At one extreme, Unconferences can be totally unscheduled meetups, with no set topics (just an umbrella theme), self-organized in real time using Open Space or some similar technique. You spend the time talking about the issues you want to talk about with others who want to talk about the same issues. Everyone is an equal participant, and everyone needs to take the responsibility to prepare for the sessions by pre-reading and thinking in advance about the subjects.

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