What to expect?

The Unconferenz is an attendee driven day of programming collectively built by the people, for the people.  It is an informal conference where everyone is encouraged to participate and the sessions topics are suggested by the attendees. One of the best aspects of the Unconferenz is that attendees both provide the sessions and choose the schedule, encouraging attendee participation and interaction.  Due to time constraints, we try our hardest to get topic ideas before the actual day of the conference at our IdeaScale site.  Please submit an idea that you’re passionate about!

How it all works

After you register, you’ll be given five dots and a few pieces of paper. Here’s what you need to do.

  1. Walk over to the table that has a list of all the sessions.
  2. Use the five dots to vote on sessions that you’re most passionate about.
  3. If you’d like to engage with others in a topic, make sure to write it down and place it on the table (and vote for it with dots!).

Voting Table

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Unconferenz 2012 by Ryan Ozawa, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

After everyone has voted, the dots are tallied. The topics with the highest totals will be dispersed throughout the grid in an attempt to not cause scheduling conflict.  The grid in the main room will be updated to look like below:

Completed Session Grid

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Unconferenz 2013 by Ryan Ozawa, CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0

Once the sessions have been posted, a new link on the top menu bar of this site will appear called “Session Schedule”. Make sure to load that link throughout the day to see the schedule of all sessions, the location of the rooms, and links to the collaborative notepad.

How do individual sessions work?

We get asked this quite a bit.

All attendees are encouraged to present or facilitate a session or otherwise contribute to the event. Everyone is also asked to share information and experiences of the event via public web channels, including social media and shared documents.

The objective of the session is not only to brainstorm ideas but to encourage the participants to explore ways to convert those ideas into actionable items. Every session will have a link to a collaborative note-taking area. Please use these notepads!