Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? forum: topic
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Scientists, unconferences and culture clash
Ian Mulvany
Thursday, 26 February 2009 12:24 UTC
I just posted the following message on Nurture, but was wondering if anyone here might have any feedback?
Someone I know recently emailed me with the following question
“I’m co-organizing a biomedical/healthcare-themed unconference to be held later this year, and culture clash has come up as an issue. Were you involved in any of the SciFoo events? Can you offer any advice for how to approach this? Any hard lessons learned?”
Sadly I’ve not been to a SciFoo event yet, but I have been to plenty of scientific conference and one or two geek driven unconferences. From what I hear there are indeed some differences that emerge when unconferenceing with scientists compared to unconferencing with Geeks. For a start an important part of a scientists career development revolves around making well argued presentations of their work to their peers in the crucible of the conference. Add in the lecturing role and you have an individual who is very used to standing up in a room and presenting the complete story.
One of the goals of an unconference is perhaps to tease apart the complete and finished story, to look at the spaces in between and to be open to blue sky thinking. This may lead to a slight mismatch in expectation about the kind of conversations that the organizers might hope to happen at an unconference, compared to the mode of communication that a scientific group brings with them to the meeting.
I know that the SciFoo invite is very specific about this, and through application of the Chatham House Rule an environment of open discussion is fostered.
I’m sure many of the people out there reading this blog have some input into the question though, so I thought I would post here and see if any of you enlightened science geeks might have some advice for my friend?
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Replies
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Explain the concept to participants several times as you contact them by e-mail during the months leading to the session. Explain it again during the Introduction at the conference.
Seed the meeting with several people who have been to SciFoo or various BarCamps before – talk to them in advance and ask them to be the leaders: to break the ice, to show by example how it is supposed to work. Others will follow their lead.
I have written about some challenges to organizing an Unconference recently. In the end, no matter how wonderfully it goes, there will be a few people too uncomfortable with the lack of rigidity to enjoy it – c’est la vie.
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Agree with Bora, explain, and then explain again. Have an explicit privacy/disclosure policy if it seems appropriate. Try and make sure you have some seed sessions set up to go from people who “get it” and, if appropriate, even have some invited speakers give a keynote if it seems necessary to bring punters in. Essentially, like any conference, have backup plans for your backup plans. The organisation for an unconference can be much harder than for a conventional meeting. Finally – try and get the right number – and the right number of rooms. I think 50-100 is probably the right number for a one to 1.5 day meeting. And good luck!
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I am one of the organizers of SciBarCamp (in 2008, and we just started planning the second one) and of our approximately 130 attendees, only about 10 or 20 had been to an unconference before (some had been to SciFoo, others to local tech events). Not all our attendees were scientists, though. We attracted a great deal of artists and writers as well, who might be more open to the concept of an unconference.
We didn’t publicly and explicitly open up registration to everyone at the same time, but first invited a couple of people to seed the participant list on the (public) wiki. Then, when we sent out further invitations and posted about it online, everyone else could see that there were already people registered, and could click through to find their affiliations. I think that greatly helped the way in which people viewed the event. If we had just sent out anonymous invitations to everyone at once, it might not have worked.
We also tried to somewhat control the type of discussion by announcing four core ideas on the site, and encourage people to think about those. Our initial invitations also went out to people who we thought could contribute something interesting about a certain topic, and that worked out well. We knew from looking at the participant list that there were going to be sessions about synthetic biology and about science fiction – and there were! =)
We explained the model of unconferences on the website and in invitations, and sent our some more general e-mails closer to the weekend itself. Our event was 2.5 days: on Friday night, everyone got together and introduced themselves very briefly. We got this inspiration from SciFoo – not all unconferences do that, but we thought it was very valuable in giving people a chance to know who else is at the conference, and not find out when they leave that they would have really liked to talk to so-and-so if only they had known they were there. However, we had heard that the introduction round at SciFoo was quite long and boring (sorry to say this on a forum of one of the organizing parties!) so we had decided to cut off number of participants at about 100 (in the end 130) to keep this in check. From other unconferences I’ve attended, that does seem to be the maximum number of people you can successfully have an unconference with. More than 150 becomes very difficult and overwhelming for everyone. (On previewing my comment I saw that Cameron is even more conservative with the numbers. But yes, 100 is good. Fewer is fine.)
On the introduction night (Friday) we also explained the process again, and we let people propose things they wanted to talk about. They could write their ideas down on a sheet of paper, and stick it to one of several poster boards in the room. Then everyone walked around, mingled, with drinks in their hand, and read the descriptions of the proposed sessions on the board. We had people vote for sessions, or leave comments on the sheets.
After everyone left on Friday night, the schedule was made for the next day based on the proposed sessions and number of votes. (All sessions were scheduled in, but some very similar ones were combined after talking to the sessions leaders. Sessions that got lots of votes were put in bigger rooms, because they would likely attract a bigger audience.)
On Saturday, we did the same for Sunday – using both sessions that were proposed on Friday and not yet scheduled in, or new ones that were suggested based on discussions and ideas people had on Saturday.
Nobody seemed to have a problem with the concept of doing it this way. The main complaint we heard from attendees was that the sessions were not all the same length, so if something ended in one room, you could end up in the middle of something in the next room.
The fact that the schedule was not announced until the event itself was made clear to everyone in advance, so they knew that there was no way to tell beforehand what you would miss if you skipped Saturday afternoon, for example.
But in general, I think we announced and explained the unconference format well enough in advance that everyone knew what they were getting into.
We had urged people to think about topics beforehand, and even discuss them online. I did this myself to set an example, and several people blogged about the event beforehand and afterward. One even started a blog for the sole purpose of discussing SciBarCamp, but in general the people that did this were already quite web-savvy. However, we got non-bloggy people to participate in the wiki a bit, and everyone did very well at the event itself. There didn’t seem to be a culture clash once people were together in a room talking about topics they were all interested in.
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Thank you for these useful and informative responses.
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A small but perfectly formed unconference happened last weekend: read about it starting here.
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