Unconferences
From the Wikipedia atn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference
"An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance."
Description
Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon:
“The concepts of "spectator-free" and "unconference" didn't appear with the BarCamp, but they are contemporaneous and their emergence is in phase with several other attempts to organise "open" gatherings and public meetings. The term unconference was first used in the late 1990s for techies' meetings (XML developers) and became more popular when it was picked up by the blogger community in 2003 and 2004. The "Open Space Methodology" was theorised by Harrison Owen in 1987 (OWEN, 1997), but two more recent big annual gatherings have been more significant in spreading these new collaborative practises. At the world level, the WSF (World Social Forum) and its local and continental versions are the biggest events using this kind of bottom-up methodology. The forums – which are a gathering of those who reject neo-liberal globalisation - are able to attract up to 150,000 activists, as in Brazil in 2005 (AGUITON & CARDON, 2005). In the Nevada desert, another event, regularly attended by the San Francisco BarCamp core group, is organised each year in the same participatory way: "Burning Man" is an artistic gathering of almost 40,000 people, guided by ten principles; radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
In the BarCamp, as well as in the WSF or Burning Man, there are technical organisers, but the content belongs to and comes from the participants, who build the events in a bottom-up self-organised process. BarCamp, as well as the WSF or Burning Man, is a contact-generating machine. Attending those events, participants don't know what they will discover, but they do know that there will be a chance to present their ideas or proposals, to learn from others, and to get new contacts or to refresh old ones. These are characteristics very similar to those we identified in the use of Web 2.0 applications and services in the first part of this paper. “
Source: The strength of Weak Cooperation. Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon. Communication & Strategies, No. 65, 1st Quarter 2007.
More Information
See the entries on BarCamps and Open Space Technology