Doc’s Thoughts on Unconferences
That’s what PodcasterCon is going to be, an unconference. AKA a OpenSource Conference. Here are Doc Searls ten suggestions.
1. Gather around a subject rather than a publication, a publisher, an analyst or any other established source of finished wisdom by lecturing authorities.
2. Make the subject so new that most of the wisdom still is forming. This is critical. There are a lot of subjects out there on which everybody is busy making and changing minds rather than compiling finished documents. These are the subjects for which there are too many qualified speakers available to bother casting one person in that role.
3. Recruit attendees from the population of people who are forming that wisdom, informally. These are the people thinking out loud about the subject and contributing unique wisdom to it. Podcasting is a good example; so is grass-roots journalism.
4. Don’t set the topic agenda. Let the attendees do that through a conference wiki or some other shared DIY note-taking area. This is one of the cool things I learned form O’Reilly’s first Foo Camp. The schedule was an empty grid. Rows were times and columns were rooms.
Attendees posted topics in boxes on a first-come, first-post basis. It was, in effect, a DIY conference. But do begin and end the day with everybody in one room. It frames the day and gives the organizer a chance to play host, make announcements, set the ground rules and so on.
5. Provide working wireless connections with no encumbrances–no splash screens, registrations and so on. Make it as easy as possible for everybody to get on the Net, blog, join the IRC, update a wiki or do whatever else they want.
6. Record and podcast the sessions. The idea isn’t to make the event public but to seed the world with whatever wisdom grew at the conference. One thing I like about the Bloggercon conferences is the sense that the whole field moved forward. It was like we got together, and instead of raising a barn, we agreed on improved barn-raising materials and methods.
7. Create plenty of opportunities for schmoozing, including evening networking events. Set up meeting space, too, if possible.
8. Set out a lot of cold water and ice, in addition to coffee. It’s just a bugaboo of mine. I’ll pay more for a conference that doesn’t skimp on vittles.
9. Designate a summarizer. Somebody needs to follow up on the conference, gather feeds of searches by Technorati, PubSub and Feedster on subjects that came up during the conference and summarize the whole thing. It’s not possible to catch everything. What matters is knowing that the conference made a difference in the world.
10. Learn and reboot. And share the wisdom about the conference itself: how it succeeded and failed. What worked and didn’t. We have an institution to rebuild here. There are a lot of mistakes to learn from.
This is how PodcasterCon should work! 