Unconferences started as independent conferences where the attendees organized and created the content on-site. These events do things that are hard for traditional conferences– they create great discussions, cover nichier content, and can cover more relevant topics because the sessions don’t need to be announced months in advance.

However, unconferences don’t need to be done as independent conferences–they can be incorporated into a traditional conference program. MPI, an association of conference professionals, ran an unconference track as part of their recent Meet Different Conference. The Web 2.0 Expo series of conferences has been running an unconference track (Web2Open) at their last three events. I co-organized the last Web2Open and here are some tips that you can use for your own unconference track:

1. Use OpenSpace techniques.
We’d never organized an unconference before so we were worried about the logistics. How do you explain the concept? What are the ground rules? How do you facilitate the schedule creation? We read up on and cribbed techniques from OpenSpace Technology. Open Space is set of techniques and resources for running meetings such as unconferences. They’re a great resource and we did fine as first-timers because of them.

2. Discussion only–no presentations or projectors.
One of your major headaches will be turning down people who want to give sales presentations. If their presentation was any good you would have already accepted them into the main track. The strength of the unconference track is that it allows for discussion. We had plasmas available but the best sessions were discussion only. Don’t give any room for people to lecture. Take away the projectors. Say no to presentations. Everyone will be happier with the result.

3. Have a highlights board in the main conference area.
At an independent unconference everyone is there for the same thing. They’re in the same area and on the same schedule. If you’re integrating an unconference track you’re going to need to work hard to make people aware of all the great sessions that are going on. We put a big white board in the main area and put highlights from each time slot.

4. Offer free passes for volunteers.
Our volunteers spent a lot of time answering questions about what an unconference was, what sessions were going on, how someone could add a session, and where a particular session was being held. That left us free to help the speakers, work out space issues, and actually attend part of the conference that we’d spent all this time organizing. The volunteers seemed happy to trade their time for free conference passes.

5. Coordinate before-hand online.
Normally unconferences put up a wiki where attendees can announce that they’re coming and suggest session ideas. This sort of coordination becomes an order of magnitude more important when you’re incorporating the unconference into your main track. Attendees will be coming and going. But how will they know when to come? By far the most successful session at Web2Open was on Health 2.0. The session coordinator found every single attendee in health care or medicine, emailed them to let them know about the session, and asked them what topics they wanted to cover. The result was 30 attendees who went over their allotted time by 60 minutes and when they finally did end, had looks on their faces that made clear that they’d just attended the best session of their lives, one that had been specifically tailored to them.

How did the Health 2.0 guy find and contact all those attendees? Web 2.0 had a CrowdVine conference social network. Wiki’s are nice but our social networks make it much easier to discover attendees (because of our tagging feature) and then to contact them. We hear a story like this every time we’re involved in an unconference.

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