I love going to these loosely organized, informal, and topic specific events for many of the reasons that Phil articulates. It’s not coincidental that the rise of the unconference and blogs/wikis has been simultaneous, the easy group forming and zero cost of information sharing and collaboration that blogs/wikis enables is what makes the unconference possible. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say that this is the beginning of the end for traditional vendor sponsored trade events, I will suggest that format may be a dinosaur that will not survive in it’s current form unless these organizers enable a great level of participation by lowering the barriers to participations. When is the last time you went to JavaOne and felt satisfied?

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I heard some similar comments from others. The ability for people to create their own agenda is incredibly powerful. If we’d done this as a traditional conference, we would have nailed down the agenda and speakers two months ago. By the time we got to the event, everyone would have been interested in something else. The unconference format allowed us to nail the sweet spot of the conversation without even trying. The people who came to the workshop did that naturally as a matter or participating.

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