I’m just back from our first JA-SIG Unconference, and I must say I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. For those unfamiliar with the unconference format, it’s a self-organizing event — no prepared agenda or presentations — that becomes the creation of its attendees.
We seeded the content with several weeks of discussion by phone, email, and wiki, and we bounded each of the two days with some organized activities for the sixty or so attendees who arrived at the Rutgers University conference center. After a session of introductions and “lightening” talks — brief, volunteer discourses on just about anything of interest — we spontaneously filled a whiteboard with a schedule of sessions that spread out over several conference rooms throughout the day. We re-grouped at the end of the day to process how things went and talk about plans for the following day.
A few things impressed me the most. One, as I told the group today, the degree of creativity, intelligence, generosity, and collaboration was amazingly high. I’m used to seeing that at JA-SIG events. Still, it amazes me to think about sixty people, a third of whom had never even been exposed to our community, creating this experience for themselves, organizing it together in the best possible way, asking and answering important questions, planning future work together, learning and sharing, designing code, and just enjoying each other’s company–all over the course of 48 hours.
I was also particularly impressed by the motivation and rigor with which our gang made really productive strides towards beginning important new initiatives that had been on the back burner for a long time in the areas of licensing, portlet sharing, LMS/portal integration, and project incubation, to name a few. We left the unconference with a list of follow-up activities and go-to people assigned to them. (A number of them have stayed a few days longer to get some real stuff done.)
I’ll say more about the unconference in upcoming posts, but, in summary, I think I speak for most of us by saying that I’m really looking forward to the next one.
