I have been involved with conferences for quite a while. I had responsibility to organize the conference, attend them as an attendee or a speaker. All that time, I had no idea there is another way to the conferences.

All of the conferences I’ve been in had a schedule, usually a tight one. People attend the sessions one after another, it becomes overwhelming at the end of the day. In those kind of meetings, I usually preferred skipping a session or two for a good conversation with a colleague, but I almost always felt guilty for this. I had no idea there is a conference format embraces collaboration, inside or outside of the meeting rooms.

I have attended AllDevs Meeting with my colleagues last week. It was my first unconference with Open Space Technology method. Other than the starting, lunch and dinner hours, almost nothing was set beforehand. There was no agenda. In order to plan the first day’s sessions, we had a marketplace.

The Marketplace

At the start of the marketplace, there was only a matrix with time slots and rooms hanged on the wall. The facilitator asked everyone that want to have a session, decide on a meeting room and topic, then explain the session briefly in one minute. There was no prerequisite for having a session and the only rule was to show up in time. At the end of the marketplace, we had more than 20 sessions planned for the day. Me and my colleague Daniel also had a session about Apprenticeship.

My colleague Mathias had captured that wall, I would like to share to visualize.

There was also unique definitions in Open Space Technology I especially liked. The butterflies and the bumblebees are welcome at the unconference.

The Bumblebee is a person who is not willing to complete a single session, instead cross-fertilizing the ideas between the sessions by attending different sessions during a session. This role increases creativity and shares solutions that other sessions came up to prevent reinventing the wheel.

The Butterfly is a person that is not feel like to take part in a session, but a new unexpected conversation may happen when she meet with others.

Most importantly, there is a law, the law of two feet. If one can find herself in a position that neither learning nor contributing, then she can leave the session. I loved the freedom provided by the law of the two feet.