Figuring Out How to Plan an Unconference
Yesterday I posted that Kennesaw State University will be hosting a Web 2.0 Unconference on Saturday, Feb. 10, 2006. Sherry Heyl is the driving force, but since I am on the planning committee I thought it might be a good idea to do research on why unconferences are unique and what causes the best to be successful and what could causes the worst to be flops.
First just what is an unconference? Of course, to find out we must turn to wikipedia, which is sort of its own kind of unconference. Here is the key piece of information:
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 organizers, in advance.
Hmmm, I am not sure if we are going that route. We are having a planning session on Dec. 12 to actually see how un this unconference will be. Of course, like everything in the open source, collaborative intelligence, crowdsourcing world, the best projects even though they might seem unstructured are indeed structured.
Here is some advice from Scott Berkun who blogs on How to run a great unconference session.
One trick with unconferences is not to bet the farm on self-organization: people running sessions have a job to do, and it’s up to them to make the sessions work.
And here is David Winer’s answer to the question What is an Unconference? In it he says the fundamental law is:
The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage.
I have to run to pick someone up at the airport, but this is a start. More later and as the research and planning unfold.
