Six reasons why unconferences aren’t more popular

Are unconferences popular? An extract from Adrian Segar’s peer conference calendar, available at https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/upcoming-events/ [future events] and https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/news-events/past-events/ [past events] 29 June 2023 - : UKEduCamp, 38 Mappin Street, Sheffield City Centre S1 4DT, United Kingdom More information » 22 June 2023 - : DVB World Unconference on the Future of Media Delivery, Maison de la Poste, Rue Picard 5/7 Bruxelles, 1000 Belgium More information » 01 June 2023 - 04 June 2023: SoCrates UK 2023, Alexandra House, Whittingham Dr, Wroughton, Swindon SN4 0QJ, UK More information » 20 May 2023 - 21 May 2023: SpaceUp—The Space Unconference, Angers, Loire Valley, France More information » 09 May 2023 - 10 May 2023: EBRAINS Unconference: Neuroinformatics on Psychiatric Disorders, Copenhagen, Denmark More information » 28 April 2023 - : Cardiff Translation Unconference, Insole Court, Cardiff, WalesWhy aren’t unconferences more popular?

Events and media consultant Julius Solaris shared at the Unforgettable Experience Design Summit that he was initially very enthusiastic about unconference format events. He thought conferences would eventually adopt unconference models. But Julius didn’t see them catch on and now focuses on other aspects of the meeting industry.

I’ve been a facilitator, designer, and proponent of unconferences (aka peer conferences) since 1992. I still believe that these events, when well-designed and facilitated, offer the best attendee experience for the majority of conferences that are held today.

So, why aren’t unconferences more popular? Here are my six reasons.

1—Unconferences that aren’t

According to Wikipedia, unconferences are participant-driven meetings where the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting.

Unfortunately, far too many event promoters either haven’t a clue about what an unconference is, or, worse, deliberately call their events unconferences when they aren’t. They use “unconference” as a marketing buzzword to make their event sound cooler.

Let’s be clear. An event that:

  • Asks potential presenters to submit pre-event proposals for sessions isn’t an unconference.
  • Includes breakout sessions as well as presentations isn’t an unconference. [No, really, some folks say this!]
  • Claims unconference means that you get to choose which sessions you want to attend isn’t an unconference. [Don’t believe me? That’s how Google defines its annual  Search Central unconference! <sigh>]

When attendees have a poor experience at what I call “ununconferences” that they’ve been told and believe are unconferences, naturally they will conclude that unconferences are nothing special.

2—Poor unconference design

Half a century ago, as a lowly graduate student, I attended tons of traditional academic conferences. And I hated them.

Many people have the same experience. So it’s understandable that when they have the desire or opportunity to create a conference themselves, they decide that they will open up the choice of program sessions to the attendees. They will hold an unconference!

The problem is that they often have no experience of what’s needed to create a good unconference. The tendency is to assume that because you’re rejecting the rigid format of traditional conferences, you can get away with less structure.

In reality, unconferences require a fair amount of structure. And it needs to be the right structure. For example, figuring out what attendees actually want and need to talk about doesn’t happen at the drop of a hat. Introducing attendees to each other and then facilitating connection around relevant content is an art, not a science. Closing sessions that meet personal and group wants and needs are often absent.

Because many so-called unconferences suffer from non-existent or poor design and/or facilitation they often turn out to be chaotic and unsatisfying. Such attendee experiences further reinforce the myth that unconferences are no big deal.

3—Overlooking the space needs of unconferences

Novices who try to hold unconferences invariably underestimate venue space needs. Compared to traditional conferences with the same number of participants, unconferences need larger general session rooms, because participants need to move about and meet in small groups, rather than sitting in fixed dense sets of tables and chairs. They also need more separate breakout spaces for participants to meet. Venue room capacity charts don’t include these designs. The result is that novice-organized unconferences rarely have the venue space they need to work well.

The solution to this is to design your unconference before choosing the venue. When this doesn’t happen (sadly, most of the time in my experience) the conference design, no matter how good it is, suffers.

4—Non-existent or insufficient pre-unconference attendee preparation

Unconferences are fundamentally different from broadcast-style meetings. Unconferences are led by participants, while traditional meetings are led by presenters. For an unconference to be successful, attendees need pre-event preparation. This is not a big deal, but it needs to be done. Conveners of well-designed unconferences explain, in general terms via pre-event communications what the unconference will be like and how to prepare for it.

One way to introduce conference newbies to a recurring unconference is to use a buddy system. Pairing returning participants with newbies and having the pairs get in touch with each other before the event is an excellent way to prepare folks who haven’t experienced an unconference before.

5—Assuming that “unconference” is synonymous with “Open Space”

Open Space is the most well-known unconference format. For many who plan an unconference, it’s the only format they’re aware of.

Don’t get me wrong. Open Space is an excellent format for short unconferences, and I’ve used it frequently myself. But it is not the only format available and is often not the best choice. I’ve written about this in my books; here’s a short critique of Open Space. In a sentence, Open Space provides little opportunity for participants to discover important peers, privileges extroverts, may not meet the actual wants and needs of participants, and uses a rather crude closing process.

A well-facilitated Open Space unconference is often an improvement over holding a traditional meeting with the same participants. But it is far from the only format that organizers can and should use.

6—The “unconference track” trap

Some event stakeholders make the well-intentioned but disastrous mistake of adding an unconference track to their traditional conference.

It’s the biggest unconference mistake you can make.

Most attendees don’t know what an unconference is or have had a bad experience at a poorly designed event. The result is that very few people will attend an unconference track. The event organizers notice the poor attendance, decide that providing an unconference “option” is not needed, and go back to a fully traditional conference format at subsequent events.

Well-designed unconferences are alive and well

People are holding well-designed unconferences all the time. Very few are large or high-profile. The variety of organizations and communities that run them might surprise you. (For example, while writing this I heard about the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association unconference, about which they made an excellent video.)

IBTTA July 2023, Nashville unconference (click to watch)

To get a taste of what’s going on, I maintain a peer conference calendar that lists unconferences that I hear of or are told about. Check out my calendars of past and upcoming unconferences. And if you’re holding one, submit the details and I’ll happily add it to my calendar!

To conclude

When designed and executed well, unconferences tend to endure. The one that began my meeting design journey, has now been running (apart from a COVID hiatus) for 33 years.

If I can help you design and facilitate an unconference for your organization, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Do you have other suggestions as to why unconferences aren’t more popular? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

How to accidentally write a popular blog post

write a popular blog post: a screenshot of a Google search for "delete mail". It shows an article I wrote at the top of the list of 127 million results.I accidentally wrote a blog post that receives more than a million page views every year. For proof, type “delete mail” into Google. My post How to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step is #1 of the 127+ million results [as of 2017].

How to accidentally write a popular blog post? Actually, I’ve accidentally written several popular posts, and I’ve finally figured out what happened. Want to know what I’ve learned, so you can deliberately write popular posts? Read on!

First, check out a couple more of my popular posts [as of 2017].

  1. Google “iPad plan transfer“. Of the 17+ million results, How to move an unlimited AT&T data plan to a new iPad ranks #2 — right behind Apple’s official support article on this topic.
  2. Google “http error wordpress“. Even though my post How to solve the infuriating HTTP error when uploading images or videos to WordPress is only a few months old, it ranks #7 of the 8+ million results. (And it’s moving up the page!)

Surprisingly, I didn’t write these posts to get lots of page views. Here’s what happened. I wrote these posts because I discovered good answers for problems that were bugging me and wanted to share my solutions with the world. What I didn’t realize was that many other people were also having these problems and, while looking for good answers, found my posts. Google did its magic…and the rest is history!

So I’m going to share what I’ve accidentally learned about how to write popular blog posts. While celebrity dramas, heartrending stories, and clickbait content are always going to be big draws, anyone who has solved a common tricky problem can use the following process to write a popular blog post.

First: Choose a problem you’ve encountered that drives you crazy

Choose a problem you’ve encountered that drives you crazy, either because the answer:

  • Isn’t on the internet; or
  • There are articles on how to fix the problem, but none of them are helpful, clear, and definitive.

For example, in January 2014 I got tired of deleting emails from my iPhone one at a time. Surely, I thought, there must be some way to delete all emails at once. I spent an hour searching for a solution and, buried amongst numerous complaints that Apple was so [expletive deleted] unreasonable, found a completely unintuitive method that was somewhat poorly explained. I tried it and it worked. So I wrote up a cleaner version of the process (with full attribution to the original poster). That’s how my most popular “delete mail” post came into being.

Remember this. Just about every time you find a solution on the internet, you end up on a web page that’s highly ranked for that problem. For example, Googling “diy treadmill desk” takes you to “How To Build A Treadmill Desk For Under $20” (on a lifestyle blogger’s site). Googling “fix broken dishwasher” gives you “How To Fix Broken Dishwasher” (a dishwasher parts commercial site that contains useful information for diagnosing dishwasher problems). In my experience, Google is pretty good at discovering and highly ranking web pages that contain genuinely useful information. It may take a few months for the Googleverse to recognize quality, but I’ll bet on quality over tortuous SEO machinations any time. Find and solve a problem that drives people crazy — and the post that people flock to could be yours.

Second: Figure out how to definitively solve the problem (best). Or at least solve it far better than any other “solution” you can find (still useful)

OK, this can be tricky. Finding a definitive or best solution may take a while.

I purchased the original Apple iPad from AT&T the day it shipped. AT&T promised an unlimited AT&T cellular data access plan for the sum of $29.99/month. Within 30 days, AT&T reneged on this promise and discontinued all unlimited data plans, but said that people like me could keep their unlimited plans as long as they were never canceled.

So when it became time to upgrade my original iPad I wanted to transfer my unlimited data plan to my newer iPad 3.

I quickly discovered that AT&T did [and still does] not make this process easy. Searching the internet again turned up multiple complaints and pleas for help, but did not provide any useful information on what I should do. It took me several hours of numerous calls and research, to discover out how to transfer the plan. Since the resulting solution took about ten minutes, I thought I’d share what I had learned so that other people wouldn’t have to go through the same thing.

It turns out that AT&T sold about a million of the original iPads, and some sizable fraction of these buyers continue to buy newer iPads and want to keep their unlimited data plans (still $29.99/month!) According to Google, my blog post still remains [as of 2017] the definitive resource for a successful upgrade.

Third: Write up how you solved the problem as clearly as possible

Having found how to quickly transfer my iPad data plan, I documented the steps as simply and clearly as possible. I had gone through several blind alleys during my solution exploration. So I was careful to strip them out and provide an accurate set of instructions with no errors or ambiguity. When a new iPhone or iPad is released — and also, amusingly, at the start of every year when owners make new year resolutions to clear up all the emails on their iDevice — my post receives a swell of interest, though it has active readers at every moment.

To ensure that the post remains an accurate solution, I’ve made a few minor updates when Apple changes things or someone adds a helpful comment.

Fourth: Add a blog title that clearly describes the problem you’ve solved

I suggest that your title starts with the phrase “How to”. Make sure that the products or platforms that the solution covers are included in the title. I’m not an expert at titling for maximum SEO, but these post titles seem to have done the trick:

1. How to delete ALL mail messages from iPhone/iPad in one step
2. How to move an unlimited AT&T data plan to a new iPad
3. How to solve the infuriating HTTP error when uploading images or videos to WordPress

Fifth (optional, but recommended): Look for other posts on the problem and add comments pointing to your solution

There are many “solutions” to the http WordPress image uploading issue, but they all describe things to try that may solve the problem. You can spend hours trying them out, often without success. Since I’d found a foolproof way to upload the images, I added comments to some of the top Google results. I shared I had found a solution that works and included a link to my post. I have already received some responses from the authors of these posts, thanking me, and in one case pinning my comment to the top of the comment list.

Spending a little time doing this — being sure to use respectful “trying to help” phrasing — may well help the popularity of your blog post to rise.

That’s it!

I hope this post has helped you to think about ways for you to write popular blog posts too. As always, please feel free to add improvements and suggestions in the comments below. And if you get to write a popular blog post as a result of this post, please let us know!