I am heading out to Boston next week to facilitate the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council Innovation ‘08 Conference.

An article was written in the Boston Globe this week Tech Leaders Hope “unConference” will inspire entrepreneurs I was interviewed by the reporter Rob Weisman on Friday. They did a good job of talking about Open Space Technology - however it came off as if it was all “me”. Sigh.

For the unConference, the Massachusetts technology group has tapped a Berkeley, Calif.-based professional facilitator, Kaliya Hamlin, who has run about 50 similar events worldwide, mostly on the West Coast. Hamlin, known as “Identity Woman” for her work in the movement to enable a single log-on for all websites, promotes gatherings based around “open space technology” with no preset agendas.

“Whoever comes are the right people,” she said, summarizing her philosophy. “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. And whenever it’s over, it’s over.”

Whether such a free-flowing approach can work in tradition-bound Massachusetts remains to be seen. But interest is heavy. Hopcroft said the council is “oversubscribed” on experts and already has fielded 85 applications from entrepreneurs for scholarships.

I shared about the history of the Open Space Technology and how Harrison Owen invented it 20+ years ago and lives in Camden Main. Apparently this blew his whole story line that this was “new” to New England.

I am really excited about the upcoming Online Community Unconference. Registration on Event Brite. The cost is $195 and well worth it.

I really respect the long term engagement that Forum One has had in this space - convening events about online community for over 8 years - yes this was before “Web 2.0″ existed. They support a community of professional online community managers and companies who have online communities as part of their businesses coming together that rich and deep one.

This is how they describe the event:

The Online Community Unconference is a gathering of online community practitioners - managers, developers, business people, tool providers, investors - to discuss experience and strategies in the development and growth of online communities.

Those involved in online community development (and social software in general) share many common challenges: community management, tools, marketing, business models, legal issues. As we have found with our past events, the best source of information on all of these challenges is other knowledgeable practitioners.

They have a great unconference FAQ.

I will be facilitating and also convening a session about the emerging identity tools similar to the one that I gave at Net Squared last week along with talking about the proposal being put forward about relationships being nodes not just edges.

If you are a ‘face to face’ facilitator kinda person but want to explore what is going online with people and groups this would be a great friendly place to come and explore.

Last night I got several pings from friends who heard me on the last 5 seconds of Marketplace for the piece airing today on unconferences. I was interviewed by a corespondent of theirs during Mac World in January. I hope they do a good job of covering the phenomena.
The web changes ‘everything’ - including traditional conferences. Why would you go across the country to listen to people present papers, talk on panels, visit trade show booths or watch ppt presentations when you could do all of that ‘online’

• Trade Show Booths - Type your industry niche in google - visit the websites do your research
• Papers - read them before hand
• Presentations of Paper - watch them on YouTube
• PPT Presentations - watch them on slide share
• Get a sense of someone - Read their Blog and check out their Flickr Stream
• Panel presentations - read a good blog conversation about the subject you are interested in

Face time with other people IS really valuable, rare and expensive. Having meaningful conversations, getting advice from peers and tackling challenging issues is something that is good use of time. Using methods that are structured but leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” gathered are what unconferences are about

After attending the Internet Retailer Conference and the Online Community Unconference 2007 last week, I’m really seeing the amazing value that Unconferences offer. They have the right people in the room and I’ve found them to be tremendously valuable as a dialogue of sharing rather than the one-way communication of ‘traditional’ trade events. It’s very much reflective of Web 2.0. If you haven’t been to one before, try one.
-Web 2.0 business by James Key Lim

When I design, facilitate and produce unconference 80-90% of the time at the event will be spent in open space and the other 10-20% of the time will be spent with other large group participatory processes that help meet the gathered community meet its goals. These include Fishbowls, Spectrograms, cafe dialogue processes, Appreciative Inquiry, Marketplace of Ideas, Value Network Mapping, Polarity Management, Visual Journalism/Graphic Recording, and shared community maps.

This slide presentation shows both open space and other formats and goes with a 4 page PDF describing how open space is used in the communities I regularly facilitate. There is another presentation on human interaction design and unconferences. I recently wrote a piece called Unconferencing that describes how to ‘prepare’ to be at one.

I consult with organizations, companies, conference producers and community leaders helping them design effective unconferences. Recently I helped the Gates Foundation plan for an upcoming meeting of their Global Libraries Program. I also facilitate events a range of events that both I and others produce (a list of all my past facilitations is in the side bar).

I specialize in bringing networks together that over time can innovate in complex environments. I have been leading the convening of the user-centric identity community since its inception. We are working on building the next layer of the internet - the identity layer. Our 6th major event coming up in May.

Since I began leading unconferences in the tech world I have expertise in how to use community web tools to complement the processes both before during and after.
I hope you enjoy the site, please contact me if you have questions about unconference or my consulting services. Kaliya (at) mac (dot) com

A friend of mine in the facilitation world, Tree Bressen — along with Debby Sugerman and the Sunrise Facilitation collective — has written a paper about the Possibilities for Transformational Conferences.

Let’s assume that you are going to succeed at attracting 50-1000+ motivated, smart people from around the region or country to attend your conference, ok? As the convenor, you now have an amazing opportunity to engage and influence a large number of active and talented folks about an issue that is important to you. Inspiring speeches can energize attendees and spark new ideas, but that alone is not enough. There is nothing like active participation to prepare people to take what they have learned out into the world.

It covers a range of potential ways of including conversation and audience participation within ‘traditional’ conference formats.

Participatory Formats to put at the Middle or End of an informational presentation.

• Pause for Pairs
• Small Group Sharing
• Attendees Interview Each Other
• Panelist or Participant Fishbowl
• Panelist Circles

Participatory Formats to Supplement or Replace One-Way Presentations

• Storytelling
• World Cafe
• Representative Fishbowls
• Kinetic Spectrum (Spectrograom)
• Speed Dating
• Project Gallery (Speed Geeking)
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Open Space

I am really looking forward to this event. I was pulled in at the last minuet to facilitate the open space agenda creation process (I didn’t design the flow of the day). As part of the Planetwork Community I have been aware of Gil Friend’s work in this area for a while so it is nice to see the partnership he made with SUN to form OpenEco.

I am excited for the morning session - should be interesting how that conversation sparks ideas for sessions. I hope there is enough room - with 300 people expected and only 10 spaces for 4 sessions. We shall see.

Arron Fulkerson has a belated blog post up about DefragCon. He says this:

The Open Space sessions really didn’t work at DefragCon. If only Kaliya were there.

The thing is I was asked early on by Eric to participate in facilitating the event. I said yes tentatively. I lost interest when I learned that it had basically been fully designed by Eric already and that the Open Space would be interspersed with programmed sessions. I said up front I didn’t think this design would work. It ended up being like one hour a day too - way to small an amount of time to ‘have it work’.

I have a good instinct about conference design and how to weave open space with pre-schedulled sessions. This is why people pay me to help them do this well. The conference I ran last week in NY for technology managers at independent schools - I had many folks say it was the best conference they had ever been to.

My advice is to keep the pre-programmed sessions to a minimum. Under 1/4 - 1/5 of a conference total time. These pre-programmed times need to happen before the open space time. So you go from more structured to less structured. DeFrag was maybe 10% open space - not enough time for the energy to emerge and bubble up. There is such a strong temptation to enclose open space with pre-defined speakers and topics so ‘bosses will know what will be said ahead of time’ so they will feel ’safe’ sending their staff there. I guess this is true when you have a price point well over $1000.

COMMENT FROM ARRON:
Don’t get me wrong. I thought the event was great. The problem with the OpenSpace sessions was there just wasn’t enough time. It would have helped if someone was more actively involved in facilitating and summarizing too. I thought the DataSharingSummit was great b/c you did an excellent summary and you were very active in eliciting participation. Let it be known that I thought Eric did an amazing job at putting this conference together and was working the crowd to get more people involved. DefragCon was wonderful. More only comments are: the OpenSpace sessions could have been allotted more time and I think because it was so spread it out was hard to get the same level of interactivity. Moreover, they could have used more active facilitation to summarize, etc.

Today I am at the Mohonk Mountain House in NY State for the New York Association of Independent Schools Technology Manager and Librarian unconference.

The facility is just amazing it is an old wood building with deep character and history. The halls have photos of family members who own the building.

The Hotel Lobby is really made to help people connect and chat. The space is beautiful. Definably QWANful (Quality Without a Name) from Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building.

The information managers and others from NYSAIS have been meeting here for years. It is their “retreat home base”. So not only do the know the people but they know the place it is their home for conferences. This “knowing” of space has made them really at home here and have taken to using Open Space in this context.

I am about to facilitate the Foresight Institute’s Vision Weekend Unconference.
They focus on “Advancing Beneficial Nano Technology - or NanoScience focused on things that are measured in NanoMeters -> Billionth of a Meter. I am going to learn a lot

She’s Geeky got mainstream press coverage. We were in the San Jose Mercury News on the front page of the biz-tech section (I just saw the paper version today). There lots of great notes up about the event.

I am working on a great new event this fall. It is for women who work in technology called She’s Geeky. It is October 22-23 in Mountain View CA.

I would encourage you all to let women you know in tech know about the event.

We have three simple goals with the event.

• Exchange skills and learning from women from diverse fields of technology.
• Discuss topics about women and technology.
• Connect the diverse range of women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical geeky fields.

We have aimed to make it affordable and accessible for women costing $125 (until Sept 30).

I have written more about my motivations and hopes over on Identity Woman. We are doing a blog/link campaign today so if you want to blog about the event today is the day to do it.

From Holly Witchey on Musematic It’s Monday I must be somwhere post:

It’s also a little bit about how much wasted effort there is in our field, tremendously talented people consistently trying to reinvent the wheel because they don’t know about other colleagues, conferences, and consortia.

We all got excited about unconferences a few years ago (http://www.unconference.net/). But unconferences interfere with the whole “let’s meet in the bar after sessions” scenario that is so important for greasing the skids in our world.

Holly, what unconferences have you been to? The events I produce have a lot of great ‘at the bar after sessions’ time. In fact they tend to be better and richer because people are energized from their day rather then drained from being talked ‘at’ all day. I invite you to come to one of my events and enjoy the bar after sessions. In fact the topic that would be the one discussed after at the BAR can become a session in open space.

Jennifer Trant asked me to speak at the closing of Museums and the Web about identity. and like most talking heads events the topics were interesting the format was boring (granted I was at this one for a day and they did slightly more interactive things on the other days). This is the kind of event it would be great to ‘unconference’… You can still do all the juried papers and have them “published.” Folks who want to present their papers are free to do so in the open space format…and you can talk about lots of other stuff directly related to the work at hand too. The wisdom of discerning what is relevant to be talked about in the hands the attendees not the committee that has to decide who is in and who is out.