Academic

For years people have been trying to promote more substance at the AALS Annual Meeting, and I think that some of the sections are succeeding. But the notion of "unconferencing" implies that we shouldn't bother. Consider Kaliya Hamlin's view as expressed at Unconference.net:

Why would you go across the country to listen to people present papers, talk on panels, visit trade show booths or watch ppt presentations when you could do all of that 'online'?

...

Face time with other people IS really valuable, rare and expensive. Having meaningful conversations, getting advice from peers and tackling challenging issues is something that is good use of time. Using methods that are structured but leverage the "wisdom of the crowd" gathered are what unconferences are about.

What happens at an unconference? Kaliya describes it as follows:

So What Happens?

Open Space is a way to bring people who have a shared interest or who want to work together to work on something. The invitation is very important and helps frame the whole thing - Who do you want to be there and why? One way to frame this is we want to have a group representative of many organizations that have a stake in X and will gather to acomplish these deliverables.

How Does It Work?

Open Space opens up the agenda creation process so that all those gathered can put forward ideas for sessions. Because the agenda is made live in real time it is direct relevance to those gathered that day (or at least for the person calling the session).

For technical communities that are collaborating and cooperating via, IRC, Conference Calls, Wiki?s, Blog?s. and other media it is virtually impossible to figure out the topics that will be hot and need face time six months, three months or even one month prior to an event. Live agenda creations helps them make effective use of face-time during the day of conferences instead of around the edges of events programed many months ahead of time.

Even if there is committee of 1 or 3 or 10 they can?t ?know? all of what 50-300 people coming to an event around a topic need to talk about ahead of time. One way to address the putting forward of what might be talked about is to post it on a wiki so that people can get a sense of the topics that are of interest.

Space Needed for Open Space

There are several ways you can host space for open space one way is in a large room where you have all sessions going on around the edges. You can also have breakout rooms where different meetings happen. It is good if these can be as close together as possible. You can also do a mixture of a large room and breakouts.

Agenda Creation
You put up a blank schedule of rooms and times.   When we do [the Internet Identity Workshop] we typically have 5 or 6 one hour sessions in a day with 15 min breaks and a one hour lunch.

Then the facilitator or holder of the space invites those who have something they want talk about related to the overall theme come to the the front write on an 8×11 sheet of paper the title of the topic and their name. They annouce this to the room?folks can ask questions about what the session is about and then they put in a slot on the blank schedule. This goes on for about 15-30 min and voila now you have a full schedule.  Those gathered then break up and go to the sessions they want.

Would you attend a law unconference?

For a funny take on this phenomenon, check out Cash Peters.