Digital

How to organise an unconference

May 4, 2017 by laurnarobertson No Comments | Category Uncategorized

I’m going to start with an assumption: that you’ve been to a conference where you’ve listened to speaker after speaker until you’ve been saturated with other people’s thoughts and opinions. Were you a bit bored? Or frustrated that by the time it got to the questions bit you’d forgotten what you wanted to ask?

One way to avoid this experience for attendees is using the unconference format.

What is an unconference?

An unconference is a meeting where the attendees suggest and vote on the agenda at the beginning of the event.

I’ve seen them used for a number of reasons including:

• internally within organisations to highlight issues for staff and identify ways to improve staff morale
• when you need ideas for how to tackle a big issue, for example tackling the housing crisis

There’s more information on what an unconference is on a previous blog post.

If you think this format could work for you, here are some tips to help you organise it.

1. Assemble a team

While unconferences are relaxed on the day, a lot of preparation is needed to make them feel that way. It’s best to assemble a team that are passionate about the subject, have different skills to contribute and have time to commit to making the event a success.

2. Pick a broad topic

To make the unconference format work, the topic should be broad enough for the attendees to have different points to discuss.

For example if your subject is forestry, it would be better to run an unconference on ‘the future of Scotland’s forests’ as opposed to ‘ways to tackle deforestation’. Because in the latter option, you’ve already defined the problem, rather than allowing the attendees to do so.

3. Get the right people in the room

The participant-driven approach only works if you have the right people in the room.

You want to have people from all disciplines in the room that are relevant to the subject. Sticking with the ‘what’s the future of Scotland’s forests’ example, you’d want attendees including: the Forestry Commission, landowners, timber companies, carpenters, adventures companies and environmental charities.

Along with breadth of experience, it’s also important to get a range of people at different stages of their career. While you may think senior people have the power to make change happen, it can often be the people below them driving the change. For me, this is what makes unconferences powerful.

Practicalities of getting the right people in the room

The first thing to do is ask your team about their contacts and for ideas about who should attend.

The next step depends on where the community you want to attend can be found – for our diversity in the Scottish digital sector event, I went to LinkedIn and Twitter and found a great number of the people that we didn’t have contact details for.

Make sure you have people to help target relevant contacts as managing the attendee list and communicating with the people on it is time consuming.

4. Get the structure of the event as tight as possible

To make the event feel relaxed the structure needs to be tight. Some of the things you’ll need to think about are:

• the structure of the event, including timings of discussions
• how you’ll collect attendees’ topic suggestions and facilitate the topic voting session – particularly if there’s a large number of people
• the timetable and its visibility
• the number of supplies you’ll need, for example post its and sharpies
• the room sizes – put the most popular discussion topics in the biggest room
• ensuring everyone gets an equal chance to contribute in the sessions
• assigning roles for the day including facilitators for the sessions if needed, and someone responsible for timing – thanks to the recommendation from SCVO’s [Beth Murphy](https://twitter.com/Betty_Murphy), we had a team member use a bike horn to let attendees know it was time to move on to the next session
• creating a social media code of conduct – we asked people not to tweet anyone’s name or organisation unless they had permission
• how you’ll make the event inclusive for people with disabilities and/or additional needs
• how you’ll capture the key points made in the discussions and what you’ll do with them
• how you’ll include people who can’t make the event – we used Periscope (live streaming)
• how you’ll capture feedback about the event

5. Let go and enjoy it

This can be hard, but it’s important to let the attendees lead the event. Taking a step back for me meant observing the discussions and when people were able to be open and honest about their experiences the event felt like a success.

If you think you’d like to organise an unconference, but want more information drop me an email on laurna.robertson@gov.scot.

Tags: diversity, events, open space events, organising events, unconference

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