May 21st at the Computer History Museum

Registration is Open!

Unconference.net is stepping up to produce and facilitate the event because we are keen to support the learning community for community managers. Creating face to face events for online communities is one of our specialities. Many online communities are self moderating and the generatively and aliveness of how they work is matched by our unconference methods when they are face to face.

For this event we are using Open Space Technology.

The leaders/co-organizers are all rockstar community managers:

• Bill Johnston, Red Plastic Monkey
• Susan Tenby, Blog
• Gail Williams, Blog
• Scott Moore, Phoom
• Marina Ogneva, Twitter, Facebook
• Rachel Luxemburg, Fait Lux

The conference was originally produced by Forum One and I contracted with them to help design and facilitate. That event itself grew out of an invitational summit they hosted annually on online communities. I actually attended one of these in 2004 as a replacement for Owen Davis who I worked for at the time at Identity Commons (1).

I plan to bring my Identity Woman hat with me to the event and forward topics of digital identity and personal data forward at the event and hopefully get some of the amazing expertise on identity and reputation to participate in NSTIC.

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I have spoken with clients who see the value seeping out the cracks in their current organizational processes. They know they are so busy talking at their own clients or not listening to the right people outside their organization for feedback they need to improve their offerings, retain their clients, and optimize where they spend their money. Some clients know they need to do things differently if they want better results. Sound familiar?

Unconference is the answer to the question you are asking yourself: “How do I put social era practices into effect in my organization?”

Culture doesn’t shift quite overnight, even with the shocking fast spread of viral memes. What is one step you can take to transform the culture you have while mitigating the risk that it will all explode?

An event. Time bound. Clearly sculpted with well honed and proven structures.

1. Playspace. An event takes people out of the everyday practices of the organization where habit change is going to be hardest and allows for a playspace to try out something different. It is time based, so the risk is limited to the time given to the event. Some organizational change attempts, being open ended, reverberate through time without having easy escape hatches.
2. Iterative. Along with all this social era stuff is the Agile virus. We have to move too quickly to adapt in the rapid changes of most marketplaces. Do something small that you can learn from quickly. Learn from what works and what didn’t, then try again. Make it a low risk investment by keep it small and time-based, so should it fail (and it rarely does on the whole), the ramifications are localized and easy learned from in future iterations.
3. Process. Process is the structure you were looking for. There are proven processes that help increase your chances of producing value. The whole Social Era shift is about moving from answers to questions, outcomes to processes, nodes to flows. Maybe you used to rely on content. Content is in constant flux now. Trust the process instead. Unconferences have structures that encourage many-to-many interactions instead of one-to-many interactions. They are structures, and people have been using some of those methods for 30 years. It isn’t a new (high risk, great unknown) thing, it might just be new (not regularly practiced) in your sector.
4. Culture is practice. Culture can’t be decreed from the top nor the bottom of an organization. It lives in the practices of the people of the organization. An unconference not only gives the organization a story about being participatory, it gives people an opportunity to practice being participatory.

Let’s talk about how participatory process can be an effective means of getting the right people to provide the right kinds of information to increase your value flows.

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Chicago Bioneers is an affiliate of a longstanding conference, Bioneers based out of Northern California. This first Chicago event pulled in 700 people for a densely packed 3 days of talks and workshops.

As this was an open space within an existing conference with a dense schedule, we didn’t do the usual open space opening and closing. We knew participants were going to come to the open space randomly without staying from start to finish, so we had to provide enough simplicity that anyone walking in could jump right in. We used simple signage to support self-organizing. And we actively engaged with people exploring the space and joined into sessions, helping to take notes or explain the process to small groups.

The Marketplace was highly visible from the entry to the space, which was position next to the main stage of activity sharing a large room with the bookstore. Also, book signings were held in the area, which helped bring visibility to the space. It is so important at an open space within an existing conference that foot traffic brings people serendipitously to the space.

The challenge of running open space for this event, in hindsight, is that so many of the attendees were students eager to hear a speaker or participate in a workshop. The open space format was also new to many of the attendees. We provided a brief open space intro to the conference organizer to present from the main stage. We encouraged speakers and their handlers to invite people to gather for open space for further discussion of issues. A briefing on open space was listed in the conference program. And, we provided basics about open space to the website, so people could understand what to expect before coming in.

We hope that the second year (November 1-3, at Roosevelt University in Chicago), our more experienced participants lead more action groups that use the open space area to convene for forward movement together.

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There’s been a lot written already on consensus, so instead of re-writing, take a look at Starhawk’s posting on an overview of consensus.  What she doesn’t say is that consensus is a system of governance – in other words a way of making decisions in a group.

It is a method that focuses on access and inclusion of all voices. That means that it can be incredibly empowering, especially when there is time and space to include everyone. It can be incredibly frustrating when the group is too large or time is short or the pressure is too high to do such things.

It also means that participants have to be ready and willing to engage and listen to all those voices and opinions, stay present and speak their own truth while also moderating how much or often they speak up. And to be done well, it requires skilled facilitation (In fact I recommend that even participants have some facilitation training as training makes for great participants.)

And there has to be consent from the participants for facilitation and the ability to trust those facilitators. All of these things can make it hard to walk in off the streets to the movement and engage the process. It’s one of the reasons that democracy, representative or otherwise, is often favored in group decision-making: it’s easier to explain and do.  But that misses the points of inclusivity and access.

In other words, democracy keeps all voices from being heard.

Truth: sometimes that’s a good thing. If everyone needs to have a say in every decision, processes get bogged down and things are difficult to move. So in very large groups it can be a lot faster to just call for a vote. It’s fast, it’s decisive, it can meet most people’s needs.

But for sensitive decision, it’s often not enough. How do we create a space where everyone gets their needs met? I often hear people say that it’s not possible. But in consensus it actually is. We keep working on a solution until everyone can live with it. Not until everyone dances with joy, but everyone gets a say in the process and can really support the decision. In that way it’s a brilliant model. It’s great for groups that have a long-term investment in working together, creating community, forwarding goals of access and inclusion and making sure all voices are heard.

About consensus both why and overview of method: http://starhawksblog.org/?p=631

10 Common Mistakes in consensus by Tree Bressen: http://www.intellitics.com/blog/2011/10/13/tree-bressen-the-top-10-most-common-mistakes-in-consensus-process/

Resources on facilitation, conflict resolution and mediation: http://www.toolsforchange.org/resources/resources.html

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Our increasing digitality means that we will increasingly be forced to come face to screen with the various dimensions and complexities of Digital Death.
Held in the inspiring setting of the Tropenmuseum’s exhibition Death Matters, this conference will be primarily concerned with provoking discourse around the social, cultural and practical implications of Death in the Digital world.
Thus stimulating a reconsideration of how death, mourning, memories and history are currently being augmented in our technologically mediated society.
‘We hardly know what life is how can we hope to understand death?’ -Chinese sage Confucius (fifth century BC) More…

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MassTLC uses a combination of Open Space Technology and hybrid one-on-one expert meetings to create innovative spaces for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other funders, start ups and general tech innovation.

Open Space Technology has thousands of practitioners worldwide and is often used to generate change in organizational cultures. The agenda is generated live, the day of the event, by the attendees, with support from a facilitation team. This real time process means that the topics discussed and presented are live and fresh, coming directly from attendees in the current environment.

When MassTLC was trying to conceive of how to organize the 1-on-1 breakout sessions, they wanted to pre-organize the sessions, with entrepreneurs requesting specific experts, and trying to work out logistics around who would meet who where in advance. The challenge in doing this, identified by the unconference.net team, was that some of the experts likely to not attend at the last minute. The question became: how do you manage those logistics?

The solution was to draw inspiration from Open Space Technology and its “day-of” agenda craetion. When experts arrive in the morning, they get a card with space for entrepreneurs to sign up to meet with them 1-on-1 in clear time slots, using available and marked locations.

When the entrepreneurs arrived, they are be given a corresponding number of stickers with their names and could then sign up to talk to any of the experts who had posted their availability for meetings. No one was left out and no one was over booked.

Entrepreneurs were given a booklet ahead of time with names and bios of all the experts intending to attend, and their expertise. This helped the entrepreneurs make some choices in advance, limiting the logistical difficulty of clogging up the agenda walls and supporting making choices for same day connections while creating potential for future connections as well.

Design highlights

• Self organization: Real time self-organization within a structure which gives freedom to the attendees

• Structure: Appearance of being “unstructured,” but not actually formless so that attendees and experts have support in that freedom

• Development: Changing and upgrading an intact system which supports staff and organizers in having confidence in collaboration.

• Choice: Self-organizing attendees creating useful connections, making competent choices

• Accountability: Attendees take clear responsibility for themselves within the space freeing up both organizers and attendees

• Clear communication: Clear and common signaling mechanisms make the space cohesive and the ability to flow between ideas and sessions

• Innovation: A change in brand was not necessary, just updating methods generated openness which creates consistency for staff

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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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• 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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