[wsfii-discuss] Interesting article related to our discussion on self-organizing

[Ian Howard]

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/006956.html


    Deconstructing Foo-- Designing Better Conferences

Jeremy Faludi <http://www.worldchanging.com/jeremy_bio.html>
July 6, 2007 4:57 AM


Article Photo

A couple weekends ago, I went to Foo Camp
<http://wiki.oreillynet.com/foocamp07/index.cgi>, a conference /
camp-out held by O'Reilly <http://www.oreilly.com/> publishers which
we've mentioned before
<http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//005952.html>. Because it's an
"un-conference", it's surrounded with a heavy dose of mystique, but I'd
like to demystify it a little, to describe exactly why it's such a
fantastic event and how to design its successes into other conferences.

The problem with most conferences is that they're a small number of
talking heads with Powerpoints addressing darkened masses. The biggest
opportunity most attendees have to participate is asking a question of a
speaker at the end. In the gaps between talks, people mill around more
or less at random, with no clue who around them has similar interests or
has expertise they're looking for. When you're a presenter, people seek
you out, but if you're not, you're left to random chance. But Foo Camp,
as the organizers say, is "a little like Burning Man in that there are
no spectators, only participants."

Everyone is encouraged to give a talk, but discouraged from being a
talking head with Powerpoint. When I asked former attendees what this
meant, no one gave a clear answer, but once I was there, it was very
clear. It was just like being back at Reed College, my alma mater (for
the few that'll get the reference, Foo Camp is Paideia for
professionals). Anyone who's gone to a small liberal-arts school with
conference-style classes will know the format: a handful of people
discussing a topic together, each with their own insights and opinions,
after an introductory framing by the teacher (or, at Foo, whoever
convened the session). This still leverages the expert knowledge of the
session host, but it also includes the knowledge and perspectives of all
the session's attendees. Besides creating a richer session experience
for everyone involved (and democratizing the conference), the attendees
get the chance to see who else has insightful thoughts or experience
with the subject, and see who they want to talk with outside the
sessions. This design would work well for many conferences, particularly
ones with a high percentage of experts, like Sustainable Innovation,
where a third or half the attendees are giving talks already. You don’t
have to be an "un-conference" to increase participation and improve
networking.

Another great feature of Foo, much of which was new this year, was the
creation of a social network site for the event beforehand, where people
could see who else was coming and what their background was, with an
automated clustering tool that color-coded people and told everyone who
was most similar to them and who were their opposites. Even though the
clustering tool was an alpha-prototype and seemed to draw many random
conclusions, it still helped people connect at the event. ("Hi, my badge
says you're my nemesis. We must fight! ...I mean, we must talk and
figure out why we're opposites.")

Some aspects of Foo would not scale to conferences of many hundreds or
thousands of people. Sessions are only really discussions when they have
fewer than twenty (maybe thirty) people in them; they work best with
fewer than ten. This could be managed at a large conference, with
minimal overhead, by having people sign up for sessions in advance. The
anarchy of signing up to give talks was fun, and makes hosting the
conference lower-overhead, but as one woman pointed out in the wrap-up
session, the only people loudly cheering the anarchy method were
six-foot-tall men. A less elbow-based method of the same thing would be
to have a wiki online beforehand, where people can list themselves for
talks. (This was sort of tried at Foo this year, though the online list
didn't have any apparent effect on the real event.) This method could
also help avoid the schedule-clumping problem, where one time slot may
have three things you want to go to and the next slot may have none.

You might think that only software-geek events like Foo could make these
pre-conference online tools, but nowadays anyone can set up a social
network and wiki with Drupal. Hosting a conference could be as simple as
inviting a bunch of people, giving them directions to your backyard, and
setting up the wiki for them to decide who talks about what when. This
could be useful for highly-specific events run by brilliant people with
no budget.

The main advantage of an un-conference is that it helps build social
capital among participants. In addition to the participatory sessions
and collaborative / anarchic scheduling, there were places for people to
do things together. One was a Make <http://www.makezine.com/> area where
people could craft stuff together, get their photos taken with edible
light <http://ediblelight.com/>, or get their laptop lids laser-etched.
Another was the tremendously popular games of "werewolf", a game of
trust and group dynamics (which is also fun and devious).

While not every conference needs to be an un-conference (and some
definitely shouldn’t), some of its features could be designed into
"normal" conferences to create more vibrant events and create better
connections between participant