Euan Semple on (Un)Conferences
Euan Semple is a guy I first met in the flesh when he and I and a bunch of other people self-organized a small conference called the Symposium for Social Tools a few years ago in London. It was a ball, and we pulled it together in a couple of weeks. Some open space stuff, some presentations: all fun.
He has a few words to say about the the unconference meme:
[from The Obvious?: A word or two on conferences]I was also very aware of the unconferencing meme going around at the moment but to be honest I am getting pretty tired of a small group of people who have attended mind-bloggling numbers of conferences, along with pretty much the same group of geeks, over the past four years in the US getting bored with themselves and declaring conferences dead. I know from experience that there are still a lot of people for whom "real" conferences continue to have value - especially for people who are new to a subject and not one of the chosen few.
And anyway - people like Chris Corrigan, Jon Husband and Johnnie Moore have been applying open space principles to group working for years very effectively. Getting a bunch of people to self-organise round things they feel passionate about wasn't invented by Dave Winer.
I personally am not tired of conferences. I am just tired of tired conferences. Particularly the ones with the same group of twenty talking heads saying the same twenty things.
But I never get tired of Euan, perhaps because I don't get to hear him enough.
[pointer from Jeneane Sessum]
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