Pete Caputa wrote about his dislike of the term “unconference.” Personally, I think unconference is about as useless of a word as “Web 2.0.” The South by Southwest Interactive Festival is by far one of the best event/collection of humans/whatever you want to call it — oh, conferences — that I’ve been to. And it is clearly a conference. The great thing about that event is the wilingness of the organizer (Hugh Forrest) to be open to new ideas. When Ryan Gantz and I asked him about setting up the interactive playpen at the festival, we weren’t really sure what he’d think. But Hugh is awesome and he was willing to give it a try. It turned out to be one of the simplest things to set up and one of the funnest. But there’s still a core conference at SXSWi that has structure, sponsors and all that other un-unconference stuff.
Comments
4 responses to “What is an unconference?”
Amen. (Call this an un-comment.)
agreed. web 2.0 should be illegal too.
someone should mine technorati and determine the biggest made up word offenders.
Oh crap. NOW you tell me it’s a bad evil word. I’m hosting an unconference. :( Should I just quit while I’m ahead? And really, when I read your post, I thought… yep… sponsors, check, structure, kinda, wow.
Good points. Pretend we didn’t say un?
Hey Chris: I think it’s a stupid word, not an evil or bad word.
Sort of like webinar is really web seminar. Webinar sounds like something you’d buy from a late night infomercial.