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.

Demo.com did a nice overview of Social Networking Tools for Events. They do the world famous and long-lived (18 years) DEMO conference.

I liked how we differentiated ourselves in the article:

“Across the board people discount the social needs of their customers. Conferences are focused on attracting people based on the content of the conference but the people you meet are as strong a draw as the sessions.”

There’s two things we believe strongly.

1. People want to socialize at your conference. We make it as easy as possible for attendees to meet and connect with as many people as they want. Out of all the competitors in the article, our product is the only one that feels social. The rest feel robotic and mechanical and the results are too often that people don’t meet at all.

2. Our company is only as healthy as your conference. We’re always looking for ways to make your conference a consistent draw so that you get more popular every year.

News flash: CrowdVine isn’t the only site on the Internet. We’re not even the only social network. We know this. We do!

So, you’re going to a conference soonish. This conference is smart enough to have set up a CrowdVine. Maybe you’re going to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (where you’ll see Tony and myself). Perhaps you’re heading to Miami next month for the 2008 IA Summit, or Amsterdam for ApacheCon.

You want to use us to figure out who do you want to meet when you get there. You want to arrange meetups or whatever. But, the thing is, you’re a person who can speak in complete sentences and doesn’t smell bad. At least, not so bad people run away from you. So you also already have friends that are going to be there. You don’t want to spend too much time reconnecting with them on CrowdVine.

What am I describing? The Social Graph Problem, which has been discussed quite a bit more intelligently than I’m capable of on my best day elsewhere.

So, we’ve taken some small steps already. If you’re a frequent conference goer and you’ve already defined your friends on a different CrowdVine, you’ll see a “import from other crowdvines” link under your “My Network” tab.

Now, we’ve done a Facebook importer. Just click “import from facebook” under the “My Network” tab and we’ll send you over to Facebook. The first time, you’ll be asked to re-enter your CrowdVine username and password so we can associate your Facebook account, and then you’ll see the FB friends that are also on the network you came from.

Easy, right? Also, why aren’t Tony and I friends?

Caveat: At this point, we don’t support our OpenID logins on the Facebook end. I know. It’s on the to do list.

Update: We just added OpenID support to the importer.

So, enjoy! Also, this isn’t the end of the work we want to do in this space. You name it, we want to be able to import your friends through it. Stay tuned, etc.

I keep running across stories about how Web2.0 is effecting conferences.

Sometimes people are talking about how technology can help you run a better conference. David Spark’s How to Web2.0 Enable Your Live Event was the first summary that I saw. It’s still the best. But I also just ran across this academic paper, Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit. It’s a longer read but full of good info. This is the area CrowdVine is in–we want to use our software to make your conference better.

Then there’s articles about the social changes. These tools can become echo chambers for strong opinions. Here’s the worst of it, witch-hunt for Sarah Lacy. She did a mediocre interview with an extremely hard to interview CEO. In the old days people would have gotten bored and tuned out. Instead they started posting complaints to twitter, which caused a competition for who could make the most acerbic comment.

Web2.0 has also boosted the popularity of user generated content in places that aren’t using any computer technology, most notably unconferences. Unconferences are going so main stream that they now run along side normal conference tracks. MPI, an organization for meeting professionals, ran an unconference inside of their recent MeetDifferent conference. Web2.0 Expo has run unconferences at each of their last two expos and again at their Expo in April (I’m co-organizing that unconference).

Even with the occasional blow-up, this trend is good. Main stream conference content is competing with the web. Why are attendees going to come sit in a session at your conference when they can get the same information for free on the web? You have to adapt. You have to go Conference 2.0. Unconference sections let attendees get up-to-date and often extremely niche info that isn’t available anywhere else. And the social tools help people meet face-to-face. There’s no substitute for dealing with people in-person. That’s the real reason conferences are so valuable.

Interaction08 had 450 attendees and 363 users of CrowdVine. That’s 76%. I wonder if attendance at lunch was that high.

Attendees also had some nice comments on this post-conference thread. My favorite was this one:

I think that Crowdvine whether they intended for this to happen or not generates a new type of community post-conference, and that is the one where we interact without the need for an interface (or middle man - crowdvine being one).

I originally envisioned the business as a purely ad-supported operation. In that world, we’d be in bad shape if users were graduating from our software to real world relationships. However, since our clients are conferences we’re only concerned with whether we brought value to the conference. In this case, the poster met so many people in the IxD community that he no longer needs our support to keep in touch with them.

For people who have this kind of experience, the conference is the one place where they can see all their new friends in person. They’ll come back no matter what the content is. For associations, a connected membership means better knowledge transfer, better opportunities for jobs and business deals, and higher retention. Hopefully, we’ll be back for Interaction09 helping some new attendees get this same experience.

Jack Moffett wrote a really nice review of CrowdVine based on his experience using it for the IxDA Conference

Interaction 08 is only a week away, and I’m getting pretty excited about it. This is due in part to CrowdVine, a web service that allows groups to set up their own social networking site. Now, I’ve never had any particular interest in the likes of Facebook and MySpace. I do have a LinkedIn account, and while I don’t actively pursue it, I can certainly see its merits. I am really impressed with CrowdVine.

There’s more, including a nice clear description of our services. It’s wonderful to get this kind of feedback. Thanks Jack!

We’re being showcased next Monday at MPI’s MeetDifferent conference in Houston. MPI is Meeting Planners International, a huge association of conference and event suppliers and organizers. CrowdVine will be running a hands-on networking experience as part of their Technology Playground for emerging technologies.

I’m not sure what to expect exactly other than something akin to Woodstock for Conference Organizers. What happens when a meeting planning organization plans a meeting? I’m pretty sure we’re going to be exposed to a mix of best practices and new ideas. Jay and I are both going to be there for three days in order to soak it all in.

We just added Twitter to our conference offering as a way for conference organizers to communicate with attendees and for attendees to connect with each other. Attendees can now add their twitterings to their profile, add someone as a twitter friend, and get messages from conference organizers. For those who don’t know, Twitter is a simple way for people to share short messages and it works extremely well on mobile phones. Of our recent conferences, about 25% of attendees already had a Twitter account.

Here’s a couple of reasons to use Twitter at your conference:

Stronger relationships. Attendees who have Twitter accounts can include their Twitterings right on their CrowdVine profile. That’s a nice way to see what each attendee is up to, but we think the key feature is the link to add the person as a friend on Twitter. For conferences, we’re totally focused on helping people making strong connections. We think it’s a big deal when we can help two people meet, but the meeting becomes much more powerful when it converts in to a permanent relationship.

News blasts. Set up a Twitter account for your conference and then use it to send out news. Good things to send are speaker announcements, travel info, and session changes. It’s a good method for sending out info because it gives attendees several options for receiving: web, text message (great while the conference is going on), RSS, and instant messenger.

Live Backchannel. Attendees can see what other people at the conference are twittering. Some of the most common and helpful chatter is about which sessions are good, which are bad, and where people are gathering after hours.

Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco and Future of Web Apps / Miami are both repeat customers. They liked the CrowdVine experience so much the first time that they signed up again.

So I started to think about where our business is coming from. It’s almost entirely based on conference organizers going to a conference that used us or attendees using us at one conference and then recommending us to the organizers of another. That makes sense since we hadn’t been advertising or marketing the product (and didn’t even officially launch it until yesterday).

• Web 2.0 Expo came to us because the conference chair used CrowdVine at FooCamp.
• Future of Web Apps contacted us because of this Scott Berkun recommendation after using us at FooCamp
• BIF3 used us based on a recommendation from Brian Jepson who’d been part of the Maker Faire network
• IA Summit is using us next April because their conference chair used us at MX East
• Lane Becker is using us at Satisfaction’s Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit based on his experience as an attendee at Future of Web Apps London. (I think we’ll be using Satisfaction for our customer service, btw)

The thing that makes me so happy is that we’ve got a lot of improvements in line for the product. So if these organizers liked the product enough now, they’re really going to be thrilled when their conference rolls around next year.

We’re launching a new service today, CrowdVine for Conferences, a way for conference organizers to give their attendees an online space for meeting, networking, and coordinating.

Back in February we had a surprise hit when we ran a demo version of our social network software for the SoCon conference in Atlanta. We’d gone to Atlanta not knowing anyone at the conference and came back feeling like we knew everyone. To this day I still talk to the friends I met there.

Most conferences give out some sort of attendee directory, usually as a printed pamphlet. Many attendees diligently browse the attendee list hoping to spot someone interesting based on their company or job title. The limitations are obvious, company and job title doesn’t offer enough information to decide if you should connect, and if you do decide to you want to meet you don’t have good options for getting in touch.

We found that the fundamental features of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn work fantastically when applied as a replacement for traditional attendee lists. The core social network features are profile pages, creating a network of contacts, and contacting other people in the network.

• Profiles let you put faces to names and find out information that is specific to the reasons you’re at the conference.
• In traditional networks you spend a lot of time marking people you already know as friends. We’re more interested in helping attendees meet new people, so we’ve made it easy to say you’re a fan-of or want-to-meet someone you’d like to know. If the other person is interested you usually end up meeting
• Attendees contact each other by leaving comments on each other’s profiles. Common comments include setting up meetings, appreciating their work, and asking questions about topics related to the conference.

We also found that our focus on simplicity made it easy for lots of attendees to use the site. We call one of our metrics “addicts,” and we define it as how many people looked at more than 100 pages. At our last conference we had 117 addicts and three attendees looked at more than 800 pages. One of our long term goals is to work with conference organizers to track how many of these addicts return to the next conference.

We have two versions of our conference service: self-service and professional-service.

The self-service option is for do-it-yourself conference organizers. We think of these as the people running BarCamps, PodCamps, and other unconferences. It’s a simple version of our social network software tweaked for conferences and a place to integrate Twitter and your wiki. BarCampBlock, run by Tara Hunt, is a nice example of this.

The professional service is for traditional conference organizers who want something they know is going to work. It takes more than software to build a massive community in just a few weeks. We customize the CrowdVine with the conference design and branding, we provide a dedicated community manager to help facilitate networking, and work with the organizer after to pull out attendee data that will help them put on a better conference the next year.

If you’re a conference organizer or conference chair, check it out. If you’re a conference attendee, send this link to the conference committee: http://www.crowdvine.com/conferences/