Dear Conference Participant: Based
on your expressions of interest for topics at the Knowledge Innovation
Unconference session October 22nd at the Old Town Conference Center, we
have matched you with others with similar interests and complementary
competencies and developed your personal Unconference program as
follows. Click on your Discussion Partners' names to learn more about
them:
|
Topic |
Discussion Partner(s) |
Location |
| 1:00 pm |
Preconditions for Innovation |
Liz Lawley |
Walk - front commons |
| 1:30 |
The Innovation Process |
Chuck Frey |
Starbucks - concourse C |
| 2:00 |
How Knowledge Drives Innovation |
James Robertson
Euan Semple |
Breakout room 6A |
| 2:30 |
Why is Big Business Innovation-Averse? |
Jon Husband
Johnnie Moore |
Dining Room (snack buffet) |
| 3:00 |
Innovation Tools |
Ross Mayfield |
Walk - Innovation Museum |
| 3:30 |
Creating Space for Innovation |
Mark Brady |
Breakout room 7D |
|
Last
year I wrote an article about 'unconferencing',
including a suggested approach that involved having discussion leaders
instead of speakers, whose job is
- to briefly introduce, and hand out information about,
2-4 aspects of the unconference's chosen theme,
- to ask a question or throw out some new information
or a provocative statement to stimulate discussion among attendees (and
keep doing so until discussion ensues), and
- to facilitate the resultant discussion(s).
This has worked for me when the audience is small, engaged, reasonably
informed, and know (and trust) each other. But what do we do when the audience is
there to learn about something they know little about (or just because
it's a chance to get away from the office)? Or when the audience is too
large and diverse to converse meaningfully with each other without
being sidetracked with a lot of context-setting information?
The pat answer is to 'break up into small groups', using some
organizing principle to do so like Open Space (where people stand and
propose discussion topics, are assigned a place and time-slot, and then
attendees sign up for the ones that appeal to them, and 'vote with
their feet' if a session fails to live up to its promise). This tends
to mix the informed with the uninformed, and get people focused on
subjects they at least think they care about. In a short unconference,
however, doing this would use up most of the available time just hearing the topics and
deciding which sessions to attend.
David Gurteen has written
about the idea of 'conversation meetings', where there is a pre-set
'menu' of topics around a common theme, and people pre-select the
topics that interest them, which are posted on a large board (real or
virtual). Then participants can select others interested in the same
topics to 'pair up' with for conversations in break-out areas, over
meals or on outdoor walks. Presumably the pairs could be pre-selected
by the unconference organizer, and groups of perhaps three or four
might also be accommodated, to avoid conversations of uninformed pairs
with no 'content provider'.
David also writes about network badges, where you write something about
yourself, your objectives or your interests on your name tag, to allow
others at a conference to identify areas of affinity with you and cut
through the small talk. I remember reading about an electronic version
of these, where you identify your conference interests in advance and,
when you come close to another participant, the areas of common
interest are displayed on both badges (can't find this online anymore
-- did the company that made them go under?) If common interests could
be captured in advance of a 'conversation meeting', the 'pairing'
process might be automated, and made more effective.
Suppose you had a group of, say, 100 people willing to sign up for a
half-day 'unconference' session. How would you organize it? Would you
get people to 'profile' their interests (and depth of knowledge) in
advance? Since there wouldn't be time for Open Space topic-setting,
would you use a virtual board and matching algorithm (see fictional
illustration above) to schedule the
conversations and do the pairing of participants, or would the
participants prefer to (or insist on) choosing their own conversation
partners, even if that takes time? Since these conversations
are relatively intimate, compared to the safe anonymity of a large
conference, would participants balk at them? Could they be relied upon
to show up for one-on-one conversations with 'strangers'?
How
could we make this work? And perhaps most important, if we could make
it work F2F, could we then use desktop video and make it work virtually?
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
