Consider for a moment the last business conference you attended. Chances are you spent hours each day sitting silently in an audience listening to one speaker after another. There were times you wanted to ask a question, but the talking-head format doesn’t allow interruptions. On one or two occasions you may have felt that you knew as much, or more, than the speaker—but the person behind the podium was the day’s acknowledged expert and you weren’t, so you kept your peace. During breaks you stood in the corridor exchanging valuable info and worthwhile ideas with others, not to mention accomplishing superb amounts of networking. But all too soon it was time to be a member of the silent audience majority again.
Now take that conference, turn it inside out, and then stand it on its head. What you’d have is an “Unconference”—a gathering where each attendee can be an audience member, an expert, and a speaker all rolled up into one. Instead of retreating from meeting rooms to corridors to connect and share, the entire conference becomes a corridor. And with everyone plugged in and turned on 24/7, networking moves into a brand new dimension.
A more formal way of defining an Unconference is this: it’s a facilitated, participant-driven, face-to-face conference centered around a theme or purpose. An Unconference is unstructured, with no planned agenda until opening day, when all participants help determine what that agenda is (although opening day is usually preceded by posting agenda ideas on a wiki). Everyone who attends an Unconference is welcome, even expected, to be a speaker. One of the reasons to attend an Unconference is to be pushed beyond your comfort zone, to listen to new ideas, practice new skills. Power point presentations are anathema, slide shows ditto, and anyone who can’t abide being interrupted with questions shouldn’t think about attending in the first place.
If it all sounds a bit wild, well…it is. But it’s a wildness that’s far more about bounty than bedlam. There is just so much there, waiting to be taken. An Unconference is exciting, thought- and idea-provoking, and opens everyone present to new ways of thinking and getting involved. It’s participatory Democracy in action, the biz equivalent of a Town Hall Meeting. Not least, an Unconference is about having a good time. As BusinessWeek said in a 2007 article, Take Your Power Point And…, Unconferences are “a hybrid of a teach-in and a jam session, with a little show-and-tell mixed in.”
The idea behind the Unconference descends from organizational consultant Harrison Owen’s complex Open Space Technology (OST) method, developed back in the 1980s. Later, in his 1993 book, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, Owen discussed innovative meeting techniques that would eventually become hallmarks of what is now known as the Unconference.
The basics can be found in Owen’s article, Opening Space for Emerging Order, in which he outlines the Four Principles of Open Space:
- Whoever comes is the right people
- Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
- Whenever it starts is the right time
- When it’s over, it’s over.
(Download a PDF of Owen’s article)
From the mid-1990s onward, people, mainly in the tech world, began using and morphing the OST approach to meetings. A name for this kind of meeting didn’t come on the scene until 1998, when the term “Unconference” was used for the first time to announce the annual XML developers conference. That name quickly caught on.
The concept of the Unconference hit the mainstream early this century. When developing the first Foo Camp in 2003, O’Reilly Media’s VP of Corporate Communications, Sara Weinge, drew on her conversations with Harrison Owen and her knowledge of OST to develop the Camp’s format. (Read my 9/17 post, Foo Camp)
That meeting was the classic Tipping Point, creating many Unconference-type spin-offs. The now-ubiquitous BarCamp—a huge international network of user-generated Unconferences—was started by an attendee at the first Foo Camp. Another early attendee, a Walt Disney exec, instituted a yearly Pooh Camp for Disney’s Internet Group. A former O’Reilly employee returned home to New Zealand and founded the Kiwi Foo Camp. Somewhere along the line Mashup Camp came into the picture.
These days you’ll see the word “Unconference” more often than “camp” when describing this unstructured approach to a conference or meeting. A quick look on the Web revealed these recent or upcoming meetings: the Oracle OpenWorld Unconference; Interop Unconference; ColdFusion Unconference (part of Adobe MAX 2009); Digital Britain Unconference; Green Software Unconference; and Creative Unconference. There are hundreds more in the offing.
If major companies like Adobe and Disney are hosting Unconferences, maybe the corridors of power really have shifted…at least at the [Un]conference level.
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Note: I’ll soon write a post offering tips for hosting your own Unconference. If you’ve attended an Unconference I’d love to get your advice to pass on to others. Please leave a comment or write to me: 
smr.press@gmail.com. Thanks!
© Suzanne Rodriguez
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