Can you imagine a workshop with no structure, pre-set agenda, no keynote speakers, no tables and talks that require only 20 slides (or less) delivered in 20 seconds (or less)? Well, Prepare to be surprised. Welcome to unconferencing!
This phenomenon has its roots from the organization development community and is starting to hit prime time in SME and corporate conferences, workshops, retreats, and gatherings. The unprecedented call (and now shouts) for more interactivity in large scale conference facilitation is the fuel to the fire. The usually expensive events is rapidly replacing the aging workshops (which actually ends in more work and less shops). Seriously, what is UNCONFERENCE?
An unconference is a facilitated, very much participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term has been applied literally to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations. It moved from the geek sessions into large gatherings of experts and facilitators like you. Recently, many high tech entrepreneurs who by now are so tired of having lots of meetings, conferences and best of all time wasting presentations and numerous training programs. The more successful they are, the more they get invited…either as participants or worst, as speakers.
Unconference is driven by the fundamental law that the sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage. It can even be worst that this. As one observer noted: “If you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn’t have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting. In other words, putting someone on stage and telling them they’re boss probably makes them dumber. In any case it surely makes them more boring.”
Unconferences can produce creative and innovative ideas that deliver measurable results through an increase in engagement. When people build ideas together they get excited about them and put them into action.
Unconferences are implemented using a variety of facilitation methods. Some are already familiar to most of you. The tool box contains: Appreciative Inquiry, Barcamp, Birds of a Feather, The Fishbowl, FooCamp, Knowledge Cafe, Lightning Talks, Open Space Technology, World Cafe and Pecha Kucha (read that again, please!) from Japan.
You’ve probably heard or knew of Open Space—a unconference method. In Open Space, participants design the agenda, choose how they will spend their time, and generate a report that captures the lessons gathered by the group. What appears to be an unstructured approach is, in fact, very orderly and productive because it is based on principles of self-organization. What that means is that with a few simple rules, a group will do much of the organizing of a conference on its own, without heavy direction from planners, senior executives or speakers.
My favourite unconference method for trainers and facilitators is Pecha Kutcha that allows presenters only 20 slides presented in 20 secs or less (20 x 20 rule)! Checkout also sober tips for Petcha Kutcha presenters.
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