Paper: A Proven Unconferencing Approach in Search of Its Theoretical Foundations
June 6, 2008 – 5:24 pmMy good friends ‘the knowledgeboard doctors’ (Wolf, Troxler and Kazi) have written a paper digging into the unconference construct and looking around for some good solid theoretical foundations from social science. They have done good; the paper is readable, interesting, quite heavyweight (if you ask me), and, most importantly, firmly rooted in practical experience.
It’s free and I recommend you read it. Here’s the blurb:
This article outlines how unconferencing contributes to the vision of a performative social science that aims at stimulating social change. The authors argue that conference participation is an integral part of research and has the potential to support social change by enabling learning processes. They then develop an unconferencing model from the theoretical reflection of different theories from social science which reveals that unconferences support individual and social learning processes through enabling knowledge transformation as well as through creating structural links between societal sub systems.
This is a subject close to all of our hearts and one we continue to drive very keenly. All of our events have this theory their core, but we try not to go on too much about it in case we bore people who just want a gig that works.
We did a fair amount of doing and learning around conference theory with the ‘Contactivity‘ events during our KnowledgeBoard days:
As a research body, KnowledgeBoard had a strong desire to create an event environment which we could study in order to generate knowledge about this new meeting format. It was a natural evolution of our thoughts during 2005; to host a gathering which would provide us with the data for our research. It was loaded with risk, but it’s not research if you know the outcome, is it?
(From the Contactivity event report)
Since then, we have used many of our separate event design jobs to explore the themes we found back in 2004/5/6 - the European doctors with their devilishly exploratory Unbla model, and well, me (with great support from my friends and colleagues) with ongoing event design and facilitation work (PM Studio, Connecting Bristol, DC10 plus, 2gether08, BBC Learning etc.).
A thoroughly exciting thing is that I am currently co-designing an epic event with the unbla team in Zurich in the autumn to generate do-able answers to carbon reduction problems, but more on that another day; suffice to say it feels like coming home (albeit a bit of a weird Euro-warm and loving but infinitely challenging home).
Well done all! I knew you could make sense of it!
