The Orange Chair

Here are some of my tips on running an unconference based on my experience running an unconference as part of a 2-day IBM conference.

• Advertise - make sure your participants understand how an unconference is different.  That this is about what the participants want.  The unconference is what the participants make it.  Some participants still didn’t quite understand it until after they attended.  Don’t use only blogs and wikis to advertize, you want to get message out to others too.

• Make sure the sign up board is big, and is in people’s faces, preferrably before the unconference begins (we had 1.5 days for them to sign up before the unconfernece part of blue horizon began).

• Don’t expect too many people to sign up ahead of time.  Actually some unconferences don’t allow any pre-sign-ups anymore.

• Realize that some participants may still try to “present” leaving no time for interaction or questions.  Tell them that no preparation is required.  If they really really want to prepare, then set a maximum on the amount of time they can “present” and the maximum number of slides.

• You might want to specify a theme

• Hardest part is getting participants to realize that there is a topic that they can lead.  All it requires is enough knowledge on a subject to ask the right questions, initiate the discussion, and facilitate it.

• Facilities - we only had one room (a big room) so we put projectors and screens in 3 of the 4 corners.  We put flip charts in all 4 corners.   What worked best was having the chairs in a semi-circle.

• Schedule - we had 4 time slots of 35 minutes, in 4 break-out areas (16 slots total).  Next time I would like to make it longer, or have more break-out areas.

• Schedule board - we used a big white board.  I drew in the schedule and an area for people to request topics.

• Let unconference session leaders have 1-minute to tell all the participants what their topic is about.  Almost like a verbal-abstract.  Keep them to 1 minute (with a buzzer or something) or this could take forever.

• Encourage session leaders and participants to blog about it afterwards all using the same tag

• Advertise some more

Also, check out some great ideas by David Crow on tapping participants brillance.  I especially like the idea of open white boards with questions posed to all the participants.

According to the New York Times:

“Twitter has raised a new $15 million round of funding, following a bidding war by venture cpitalists eager to get a slice of the micro-blogging start-up, according to an unsourced report from GigaOm.”

Further proof that twitter will continue to matter as a Web 2.0 tool.

There is a good article on cnn.com about IBM’s internal social computing software, Beehive. As CNN rightly says, a

‘Virtual watercooler’ makes workplace more fun

I was going to put more “bee” puns here, but I want you to read the article!

An IBM colleague asked me to put together a few tips for Web 2.0 at Work. Here’s something I had fun putting together, sketching it on my Nintendo DS:

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While Web 2.0 and social computing is something that we focus on, there are many exciting emerging technologies besides Web 2.0. “Green” initiatives are also very big. IBM is doing many things in this area, and based on this article in TechCrunch, so are others. I expect to see many green initiatives underway at our clients in upcoming months.

For more on this, see Kleiner Perkins Goes Green With $1.2 Billion In Two New Funds