Running A Great Un-Conference

I’ve had years of experience working on teams developing traditional huge conferences. Put 10,000 of your friends in a big hall, give them extremely granular detail on what YOU think they should learn, WHO they should learn it from, and tell them to the minute WHEN this should happen. You may have noticed that most of those shows (think Comdex, for example) have died slow deaths.
That’s not how adults want to learn. Much like pre-schoolers, they want to decide what they want to play with. And who they want to play with. And which type of toys to use, how long to play with that toy, and who to share with.
A new concept in conferences is a BarCamp where the participants decide the topics and agendas at the beginning of the first day.
Darren Barefoot of Capulet Communications has a great list of 11 tips on running an un-conference. He’s 50% of the the driving force behind Northern Voice, the Vancouver blogging conference that just completed it’s third yearly assembly.
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