The Unconference
It seems to me that Second Life is a great place to hold an unconference. I’m inspired by Dave Winer’s “what is an unconference?”
First, a disclaimer, Mix06 is definitely NOT an unconference. Just wanted to get that out of the way.
But, what’s great about an unconference? You can make your own conference. If you wanna listen to someone else, you can. If you wanna speak, you can. If you wanna go outside and roast wienies on the fire, you can! (That’s why my evil software company is built on top of a bed of lava in Second Life, after all! Heheh).
Anyway, Channel 9 is close to an unconference, no? You can listen to a conversation, which is driven by a moderator, or you can start your own conversation, or you can even just go in the corner buy yourself and start a wiki.
Map that onto a physical space and you get either one of Dave Winer’s shindigs, or something in Second Life (on Saturday night I was dancing, virtually, in Eric Rice’s club while watching video content be displayed on his virtual wall).
Anyway, this is all a very long way to say that I’m addicted to Memeorandum and it’s been a very long day of temptation to look there. Yes, the head lemur is right, I need an intervention! Heheh.
But, before I get an intervention, I’ll be honest. I still like the good old conference model. I like going to conferences to hear presentations from other people. I like sitting back, being presented information, and spending some time thinking. Actually, this is why I don’t try to live blog conferences anymore. It messed with my ability to think cause I was trying to be a reporter/note taker.
Anyway, I’m a fired discussion leader (seriously) so I probably shouldn’t be the one consulted on what an unconference is good for.
I will say that generally I hate panel discussions (although as a speaker they are a lot easier to prepare for than a full-blown session where I’m expected to say something the audience hasn’t heard yet).
One other thing? My favorite sessions have been where the speaker has some structure, and a point to make, and then goes into the audience Oprah style to get the audience involved.
Maybe the best conference is 50% old style conference mixed with 50% unconference?
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March 6th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
A commenter on Joi Ito’s blog a couple a days ago, “Hi, I work in the Graduate School of Social Sciences at Hitotsubashi (Kunitachi). I’m hoping to teach my autumn 情報行動文化論 class for grad students entirely within Second Life, although I still have to work out the details. We use mostly Japanese in class. Please get in touch if you think there might be something of interest to you.”
Too cool.
March 6th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
huh wordpres actually has full utf-8 std and also char set -internationlized- never know that !!
actually you should also read the continuity of the converstaion in terms of mark evans post on then Dave respond to that was “If you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter”
March 7th, 2006 at 4:35 am
An “unconference” can’t make up for people who can’t speak in public. Nor can it make up for content that sucks. If the conference organizers allow a session to be nothing but marketing, that’s not going to be fixed by changing the format.
March 7th, 2006 at 11:46 am
People have been meeting in community gatherings since before our species could talk.
I just don\’t see the formal corporate run conferences as the norm.
March 7th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
On Conferences, Social Conferences, and Unconferences
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[...] Source: Scobelizer, “The Unconference” [...]
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