My favourite day of the year from a professional point of view is one where I earn no money and work like a Trojan with others to make happen.
Commscamp has been staged for the past four years in Birmingham and brings 180 largely public sector comms people together.
It’s an unconference which means that the agenda is decided on the day.
But aside from the conversation, ideas and connections from the day the best thing was hearing some people also want to stage an unconference too. There may be one. There may be two. Who knows? Fantastic. I really hope they do it.
The basics about unconferences I learned from Dave Briggs, Steph Gray and Lloyd Davies. All wonderful people. We staged unconferences because we’d been to a few and fancied having a go ourselves. John Peel used to say punk made it easy. All you had to do was push over a telephone box and sell your brother’s motorbike and you had enough money for a demo. It’s not that different with an unconference.
So here are a few tips.
- No-one owns it. Lloyd is quite right in saying that unconferences are not owned by anyone. So have a go.
- Find some likeminded people.
- Just book some space.
- Put up an eventbrite to distribute the tickets.
- Scrape together a smidge of sponsorship and UKGovcamp can help with that.
- Shout about it.
- On the day relax and have fun.
- That’s it.
- That’s really it.
See? It’s that simple.
I’d also be tempted to do it slightly seperate with what you are doing at work. So, it’s not the day job. But it’s a seperate thing helps the day job. That way you get all the fun stuff but none of the middle manager barriers.
One absolute true-ism from Lloyd is that everyone who goes tends to to love them. But then would like to make a minor change. ‘It was great, but if only we could pre-plan the sessions, that would be marvellous.’ Or whatever the suggestion is.
Don’t.
Keep it simple.
Just have some space. A Facebook group works to get people thinking about sessions beforehand. Decide what you are going to talk about on the day. Then give the thing to the people in the room and they will always, always, always deliver.
Picture credit: Sasha Taylor / Flickr
Great post Dan, sticking to the KISS principle is definitely a positive. To contribute my own organisation experience, ensuring strong wifi should also be a consideration if the event is to be held at a location with challenging mobile reception. That was certainly the case for IslandGovCamp 2012 in Orkney where the 3G mobile signal is decidedly patchy on a good day. We put considerable effort into providing a strong wifi signal on the day but were let down by external factors that we had foreseen and tried to prepare for but were ultimately let down by a partner’s IT department ‘forgetting’ we were holding our event on a Saturday and not hitting the right switches on Friday evening before they all went home for the weekend!!!