Resource:How to organize an unconference

You probably have been to a traditional conference. There are panels, breakout sessions, keynote speakers, and coffee breaks. In most cases, the panels and speaker sessions go in one direction. Whoever is on the stage speaks and the audience listens for most of the time. At the end of the session a few audience members --usually those who are more comfortable speaking up -- get to ask a question or two (which may or may not be relevant or interesting). While many speakers have interesting things to say, often the most valuable connections are made during the breaks, when you bump into someone and start a conversation... but then you have to rush to the next session. 

In contrast, an UNconference makes those organic conversations the whole event. There are no speakers and no pre-set agenda. The attendees --who come because they are interested in the proposed topic -- collectively create the event's agenda and move organically to find conversations where they can learn and add value.

The Unconference is a tradition of UIF Meetups, and in this page you'll find instructions to organize your own.

What You Need

1. A topic. This is what will attract the right participants to come. It can be anything. For instance, you can convene an unconference on "Creating a Sustainable Campus". You need to determine what is a topic that will be relevant to the people you want to engage.
2. A space. Ideally the venue has open space for people to gather at the beginning. You can use a space that has a number of breakout rooms so that each topic can be assigned to a room, or use a large open space with easels, whiteboards or paper on walls in place of rooms.
3. Facilitator(s). Most of the unconference will be run by attendees, but the role of the facilitator(s) is key in explaining how the unconference works and crowdsourcing the agenda from participants (more on this below).

The structure of an Unconference

An unconference has three parts:

1. Kick-off: participants arrive to the space, the facilitator(s) explains the rules of interaction (more below), and the unconference agenda is collaboratively built.
2. Conversations: this is the main part of the unconference, and participants gather according to their topics of interest from the proposed agenda. The conversations can take the form of sharing information, synthesizing information (ie, making new connections between data), brainstorming ideas, etc.
3. Wrap-up: participants representing the different conversations share highlights with the whole group.

The rules of Interaction

The whole point of the unconference is that you interact with the people and topics to whom/which you can add value and learn from. And this can change throughout the unconference, so a conversation you were initially drawn to may turn into one that no longer interest you. If you were participating of a traditional conference, you would be polite and stay --maybe zoning out or checking your email on your phone as the speaker/panel present. In an unconference, you would do exactly the opposite and use the Rule of the Two Feet, which states that "if at any point you are no longer learning or adding value to a conversation, you take your two feet and go somewhere else." Importantly, you do NOT apologize to the group and come up with an excuse to leave. You just leave.

When you leave a conversation, you refer back to the agenda that was built during the kickoff (in these days everyone probably took a cell phone photo of it,) and go to a new location. As you move in search of a new conversation, you can operate in two ways: 

• as a butterfly, walking about and unobtrusively listen to different conversations; or,
• as a bumblebee, who jumps into a conversation right away and points at connections and data gathered in other conversations (in other words, crosspollinating conversations.)

As a result of this organic way of moving in and out of conversations, some of the groups might dwindle down to 2 people, dissipate completely, or break out into different groups, while others might grow in participants.