One of the things that makes ScienceOnline different from lots of other academic or professional conferences is that it is structured as an “unconference”. So … what exactly does that mean?
For one thing, it challenges the standard model of the expert at a podium at the front of the room, dispensing finished knowledge to the audience. The assumption is that the “audience” is really a group of interested participants who are bringing plenty of expertise to the table, and that they will be working together with the session moderator to figure new things out.
I’ve been to the rare academic conference with “workshop” sessions that achieve real engagement of, and participation from, nearly everyone in the room. At ScienceOnline, those levels of engagement and participation are not rare at all.
Some unconferences are so participant-driven that the program doesn’t even exist until the conference goers convene. Folks use whiteboards or paper to describe a session they want to happen (whether they have the expertise to lead it or are looking for other participants who could share that expertise), and ideas, people, spaces, and blocks of time are negotiated on the spot to build a program.
For those of us in disciplines where conference presentations usually flow from finished papers submitted a year in advance, this process can feel a little destabilizing. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.
The other unconference in which I’ve participated (She’s Geeky) has used this process. Along with it, the conference organizers provide reminders:
“Be prepared to be surprised!”
“Whoever comes is the right people. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it’s over, it’s over.”
In other words, part of the point of having an unconference is to cultivate serendipity, to foster connections of ideas and people that can happen organically but that might not happen with too much rigid planning. Working this way has its risks. There may be only a handful of people interested in what you want to talk about, and what people have to say may fit in a non-standard time interval. But the risks are part of the deal to unlock the rewards.
There was another reminder, whose placard I managed not to photograph, of “The Law of Two Feet” — basically, that each participant should take responsibility for being where she wanted or needed to be, even if that meant leaving one group midway through or joining another already in progress, and that other participants should respect each individual’s decisions rather than expecting a captive audience. This strikes me as the right attitude to take to cope with a session which turns out to be not what you expected or wanted to be a part of, rather than complaining later, “That’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back.”
If you look at the ScienceOnline 2012 conference program as it’s shaping up, you’ll see that this is not a conference generating sessions on the spot each morning. Rather, there are multiple sessions in each time slot, each with a title, one or more moderators, and a description of the topics to be discussed. In other words, this is a relatively organized unconference.
My sense, though, is that even though the advanced planning that goes into the sessions seems to pull against the “un”-ness of the conference, it actually makes possible a lot more participant-steering of sessions to address things the people coming to the sessions want to talk about — burning questions they have, experiences or expertise they want to share, resources, applications, connections to other things they care about, what have you. One way this can happen is via session wiki pages. For example, I’m helping lead two sessions, one (with Amy Freitag) on “Citizens, experts, and science”, the other (with Christie Wilcox) on “Blogging Science While Female”. Those wiki pages are just calling out for ideas, questions, or useful links. (Your ideas, questions, or useful links! What are you waiting for?)
Indeed, this is not simply a matter of shaping an hour-long discussion at the conference, but of jumping into a conversation now. It’s not a conversation that has to end when the next session starts — or when the conference itself is over. Nor is is a conversation that’s restricted to the people who are physically in the room. You can be part of the conversation even without setting foot in North Carolina.
And this brings me to another way ScienceOnline strikes me as interestingly different from other conferences I’ve attended. At many of these conferences, sessions spill over to interesting discussions over drinks or meals. That happens at ScienceOnline, too — but unlike discussions at other conferences that recede into memory when you get home, the conversations at ScienceOnline have a better than even chance of being tweeted, liveblogged, or otherwise captured and signal-boosted, making it possible for us (and you, and anyone else who want) to come back to them and push them further until we (not our feeble memories) decide we’re done with them.
It sounds like so much fun. How do you fascilitate including those who do not attend into being part of the conversation?
In some of the sessions in the past, I seem to recall there being a person designated to watch the Twitter stream (with the hashtag #scio12 or sometimes a hashtag more specific to the session) for questions, comments, contributions, etc. Also, most of the sessions have been livestreamed (so people in internet-land can get the audio of the discussion in the room — including responses to contributions they’ve tweeted in — as it’s happening). I’m thinking now that Ustream (which includes a livechat feature) has also been a part of this.
Asking questions on the conference wiki before the official start of the conference is probably the best way to find out what modes of remote participation will be set up and ready to go.
I think Bora would object to one small matter above: “When it’s OVER, it’s OVER”. He pretty much sees to it that ScienceOnline continues throughout the year in conversations both online and through backchannels. And topics/issues arising at the Unconference often continue on blogs or social media well after the meatspace is over (and many of the sessions are still available virtually).
Definitely, ScienceOnline seems to operate under the motto, “It’s not over until we say it’s over” — on the blogs, the Twitters, over meals, through backhannels, wherever. (The sign pictured above was from a “She’s Geeky” conference, not ScienceOnline.) However, if you want to read it as a commitment to give topics as much time as we want to give them, and not to prolong them artificially just because a certain amount of time has been allotted to them up front, I think Bora would be on board.
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Yes! Can’t wait to see you all again!