Making Short Unconferences Work


Dear Conference Participant: Based on your expressions of interest for topics at the Knowledge Innovation Unconference session October 22nd at the Old Town Conference Center, we have matched you with others with similar interests and complementary competencies and developed your personal Unconference program as follows. Click on your Discussion Partners’ names to learn more about them:

Topic Discussion Partner(s) Location
1:00 pm Preconditions for Innovation Liz Lawley Walk – front commons
1:30 The Innovation Process Chuck Frey Starbucks – concourse C
2:00 How Knowledge Drives Innovation James Robertson
Euan Semple
Breakout room 6A
2:30 Why is Big Business Innovation-Averse? Jon Husband
Johnnie Moore
Dining Room (snack buffet)
3:00 Innovation Tools Ross Mayfield Walk – Innovation Museum
3:30 Creating Space for Innovation Mark Brady Breakout room 7D

 Last year I wrote an article about ‘unconferencing‘, including a suggested approach that involved having discussion leaders instead of speakers, whose job is

  1. to briefly introduce, and hand out information about, 2-4 aspects of the unconference’s chosen theme, 
  2. to ask a question or throw out some new information or a provocative statement to stimulate discussion among attendees (and keep doing so until discussion ensues), and
  3. to facilitate the resultant discussion(s).

This has worked for me when the audience is small, engaged, reasonably informed, and know (and trust) each other. But what do we do when the audience is there to learn about something they know little about (or just because it’s a chance to get away from the office)? Or when the audience is too large and diverse to converse meaningfully with each other without being sidetracked with a lot of context-setting information?

The pat answer is to ‘break up into small groups’, using some organizing principle to do so like Open Space (where people stand and propose discussion topics, are assigned a place and time-slot, and then attendees sign up for the ones that appeal to them, and ‘vote with their feet’ if a session fails to live up to its promise). This tends to mix the informed with the uninformed, and get people focused on subjects they at least think they care about. In a short unconference, however, doing this would use up most of the available time just hearing the topics and deciding which sessions to attend.

David Gurteen has written about the idea of ‘conversation meetings’, where there is a pre-set ‘menu’ of topics around a common theme, and people pre-select the topics that interest them, which are posted on a large board (real or virtual). Then participants can select others interested in the same topics to ‘pair up’ with for conversations in break-out areas, over meals or on outdoor walks. Presumably the pairs could be pre-selected by the unconference organizer, and groups of perhaps three or four might also be accommodated, to avoid conversations of uninformed pairs with no ‘content provider’.

David also writes about network badges, where you write something about yourself, your objectives or your interests on your name tag, to allow others at a conference to identify areas of affinity with you and cut through the small talk. I remember reading about an electronic version of these, where you identify your conference interests in advance and, when you come close to another participant, the areas of common interest are displayed on both badges (can’t find this online anymore — did the company that made them go under?) If common interests could be captured in advance of a ‘conversation meeting’, the ‘pairing’ process might be automated, and made more effective.

Suppose you had a group of, say, 100 people willing to sign up for a half-day ‘unconference’ session. How would you organize it? Would you get people to ‘profile’ their interests (and depth of knowledge) in advance? Since there wouldn’t be time for Open Space topic-setting, would you use a virtual board and matching algorithm (see fictional illustration above) to schedule the conversations and do the pairing of participants, or would the participants prefer to (or insist on) choosing their own conversation partners, even if that takes time? Since these conversations are relatively intimate, compared to the safe anonymity of a large conference, would participants balk at them? Could they be relied upon to show up for one-on-one conversations with ‘strangers’?

How could we make this work? And perhaps most important, if we could make it work F2F, could we then use desktop video and make it work virtually?

Category: Collaboration
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5 Responses to Making Short Unconferences Work

  1. Ed says:

    Last year, while editor of http://www.knowledgeboard.com, I co-ran a gathering called ‘Contactivity’ in Greenwich, London (partnered with the University and David Gurteen). We faced some very similar questions.Our approach was focused on the ‘unconference’ (we preferred constructivist) model and whether a bunch of people who hadn’t met could co-design a conference together virtually in advance (we avoided pre-setting a topic, powerpoints etc.). It was also about how to transfer knowledge and decisions from the virtual domain into the physical gathering (as we’ve all seen in the early adopting unconferences – can this be done in the less early adopting domains?). We learnt a lot (in part about multi-domain group facilitation) and there’s a lot I could go on about, and I’m happy to point you to some reports etc., but specific to your point is the networking and consequent discussions. We asked everyone to profile themselves virtually in advance on the wiki with a set of pre-defined (but loose) questions and then kicked the event off with a purposeful networking session. This was facilitated by Patricia Wolf and Peter Troxler, who are now collaborating around http://www.unbla.org. We printed out the profiles and stuck them to some boards then asked the attendees to find discussion partners from the profiles. Being that part of the profiles was a knowledge exchange style ‘offer’ and ‘seeking’ angle, their conversations were instantly effective (I’m not a great fan of networking for networking’s sake) – and, because the subjects were things they had already expressed an interest in, really quite deep, constructive etc…

  2. We’ve (oilawareness Stockholm)been using the excellent “meetup.com” (www.meetup.com) facilities to both hold discussions as well as arrange small meetings in real life. Well worth a look, it combines the ubiquitousness of internet with the ability to hold informal meetings in cafes or wherever. I also like the files facility you can take a picture of any conference notes and post it.

  3. Open Space. If I only had 3.5 hours and 100 people, I’d open space with an introduction, agenda setting and market place taking no longer than 45 mins. Thence two one-hour concurrent sessions and a 15 minute closing. Capture sessions notes, photo and audio on the web. Supporting the invitation with up front stuff is always a fine idea, but every piece of controlled process you introduce on the day gets in the way of people’s experience of each other. 100 smart and curious people will find each other quickly in open sapce. Just trust them and get out of the way.

  4. Siona says:

    What Chris wrote. Exactly. And I’d underline the last sentence.

  5. Jeff Aitken says:

    Some of my favorite community meetings were like this. 75 passionate people, three hours in open space: 45 minute opening (could have been shorter), two 45-50 minute sessions, 30-40 minutes to circle round and share next steps. Fifteen distinct group conversations (and lots of duos and trios in the halls.) All the proceedings were online the next day. One facilitator, who spent most of the evening trying to get my keys out of my locked car in the parking lot. Out of the way, as Chris and Siona say!

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