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Unconference

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An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of oganizers, in advance. To date, the term is primarily in use in the geek community. Unconference processes like Open Space Technology, however, have been around for over 20 years in other contexts.

The term unconference first appeared amongst techies in an annoucement for [the annual XML developers] conference in 1998. More recently the term was used by Lenn Pryor when discussing BloggerCon and was popularized by Dave Winer, the organizer of BloggerCon, in an April 2004 writeup. Winer's unconference is a discussion leader with a topic moving a microphone amongst a large audience of 50 to 200 people.

Open Space Technology is an energizing and emergent way to organize an agenda for a conference. Those coming to the event can post on a wiki ahead of time topics they want to present about or hope others will present about. The wiki can also be used to share who is comning because it is the attendees who have a passion to share that contribute to the event that will make it great.

The event begins with face to face schedule making which allows for emerging developments in the rapidly moving technology field to be covered. The opening includes time for attendees introduce themselves and orient to the whole group. Participants are invited to write the name of there session topic and their name on an 8.5×11 paper. They announce the title of their session to the whole room and then post it on a schedule on the wall. Then once all the sessions have been posted the community - standing in front of the schedule wall attendee move sessions around. Sessions are about an hour long with 15 min breaks and an hour for lunch. The day closes with the all participants gathering in a circle one room and sharing for 20 -30 min the highlights of the day.

[Penguin Day], started in 2004, is an unconference produced by Aspiration Tech to help non-profits connect to the Free and Open Source Software Community.

There are a range of potential unconference participant lead processes including World Cafe, Dynamic Facilitation, Appreciative Inquiry and Speed Geeking.

There are parallels with science-fiction fandom, in which a low-key convention with less structure, not focusing on professionals and guests of honor, is called a [Relaxacon].

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Related Events

O'Reilly's FOO Camp--started in 2003--is often termed an unconference, but its structure departs in several crucial aspects from the original definitions of the term. The most visible departure is that it's an invite-only event. Tim O'Reilly outlines the invitation process at [link].

Foo Camp uses a process derived from Open Space Technology but does not actually use the Open Space method to make the schedule. At Foo camp a [whiteboard with times and spaces] is put up and participants write their session topics on it. Foo Camp has been widely imitated, with BarCamp, [Seattle MindCamp], and Disney's Pooh Camp as three direct spinoffs. 

Om Malik described some of the controversy surrounding Foo Camp in 2005 in [link].




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