An unconference is an event whose schedule is built on the morning by the people attending it. There is no call for papers, no programme committee and no published line-up; instead a grid of rooms and times is drawn on a wall, and anybody who wants to run a session writes it into a slot. Everything else about the format follows from that one decision.
How the morning works
Everybody gathers in one room. Somebody explains the grid and the rules, which takes about five minutes. Anybody who wants to run a session says what it is in one sentence, writes it on a card, and puts the card in a square. Twenty minutes later the day has a schedule.
A session is not necessarily a talk. The most productive squares are frequently somebody saying they have a problem and would like to talk to anybody who has met it, which no call for papers would ever have produced because nobody proposes their own confusion months in advance.
The rules that make it work
Two conventions do most of the work, and both sound whimsical until they are seen operating.
The law of two feet. Anybody may leave any session at any time and go somewhere else. Stated aloud at the start, it removes the social cost of walking out, which is what allows people to sample a grid they know nothing about.
Whoever comes are the right people. A session with three people in it is a good session for those three. This one exists to stop proposers judging their session by attendance, which at an unconference is mostly a function of what it was scheduled against.
Three people is a session, not a failure.
What it is good at, and what it is not
It is good at subjects nobody would propose in advance: the awkward question, the problem that arrived last month, the thing everybody is quietly doing badly. It is good at rooms where most people have direct experience, and it is good at a second day following a conventional first one, because the room already knows what it wants to discuss.
It is not good at teaching. Prepared material, worked examples and demonstrations need preparation, and a format that decides its content an hour beforehand cannot produce them. An unconference programmed as somebody’s introduction to a subject will disappoint them.
It is also weak at a first event with an audience that does not know each other, because filling the grid requires enough confidence to write on a wall in front of strangers.
What organisers still have to do
More than the format suggests. Rooms, food, signage, a facilitator who can run the morning briefing without letting it drift, and a way of recording what happened, because an unconference leaves no artefact unless somebody deliberately makes one.
The absence of a call for papers removes the largest single job, which is the review, and leaves everything on the organising page untouched.
What it is confused with
An open space. Effectively the same thing under the name of the facilitation method most unconferences borrow from. Open Space Technology is the formal version, with its own vocabulary and a fuller set of rules.
A hack day. People build something rather than discuss it, and the output is code rather than conversation.
A birds-of-a-feather session. A single self-organised session inside a conventional conference. An unconference is what happens when the whole event is made of them.
The rest is in the glossary, and the format an unconference session most resembles is on fishbowl discussion.
Questions
What is an unconference?
An event whose schedule is built on the morning by the people attending. A grid of rooms and times goes on a wall, anybody who wants to run a session writes it into a square, and the day has a programme about twenty minutes later.
What is the law of two feet?
Anybody may leave any session at any time and go elsewhere. Saying it aloud at the start removes the social cost of walking out, which is what lets people sample a grid full of sessions they know nothing about.
What if only three people come to a session?
It is a good session for those three. Attendance at an unconference is mostly a function of what a session was scheduled against, and the convention that whoever comes are the right people exists precisely to stop proposers reading a small room as a verdict.
What is the format bad at?
Teaching. Prepared material, worked examples and demonstrations take preparation, and a format that decides its content an hour beforehand cannot produce them. It is also weak when the audience does not know each other yet.
Does an unconference need organisers?
Yes, and nearly as many. Rooms, food, signage, a facilitator who can run the morning without letting it drift, and somebody recording what happened, because the format leaves no artefact unless one is deliberately made.