What the hell is an
Unconference? Is Unconference even a real word? The organiser @BillBoorman told me it
was a conference where the audience participated and set the agenda. I was not
really sure how that would work, but I felt that hearing what other people
wanted to talk about was going to be very interesting.
The event was
informal, yet structured, with 6 or so small breakout sessions for attendees to
sit down and join. In the first
one I found myself on a white leather sofa making up a large square with about
20 other people and @MattAlder running the discussion, mainly around LinkedIn
and Twitter. Each individual was encouraged to talk, question, debate or state
what he or she felt suitable. Matt encouraged and answered questions but others
with experience engaged frequently.
This informal approach
was refreshing and resulted in me taking away an insight into 20 different
people’s views, opinions and experience surrounding Twitter and recruitment.
Additionally I learnt people’s fears, hopes and frustrations. It was a
fantastic 90 minutes! Thank you to everyone in the session for your
participation; I enjoyed it!
I sat in 3 different
track sessions; the last session I was in was great, unfortunately there were
fewer people- only 6, with @AlanWhitford running it. The conversation was
honest and debate reasonably fierce. Very enjoyable and rewarding.
The downside was the
middle session. The expert running it was very knowledgeable, and the shared
interesting experience. But it was not UN-conference. There was little or no debate,
the topic was less audience-lead. I feel some guidelines to those running the
sessions would help, @MattAlder’s technique going round the room with many
tangents and discussions after each individual spoke worked great. @AlanWhitford’s
session was smaller and he did really well pinpointing topics to individual’s
experiences to drive more conversation.
So to summarise – a great
day. I will attend future Unconferences. I would like for the UN to gain
popularity.
The venue was good making it easy to move between tracks / sessions as each was held in a seperate green pod - see the picture.
But the speaker needs
a very different skill to that of a typical stage speaker! Oh and @BillBoorman
– turn up the speakers during the debate next time!
