The Unconference
How to reengage people into communities
Pandemic hit hard, especially for communities. Conferences and events were canceled. Almost everyone was grounded. It changed our lives and our minds.
But we should not despair. Things are getting back to normal, and we are seeing more events and conferences being held worldwide. This gives us hope — it’s time to reengage our community members and invite them to live events.
On the 13th of June 2022, GDG Cloud Stockholm held an event at the Google office in Stockholm, hosted by Abdelfettah Sghiouar. Zahra Mirzaei and Mariana Bocoi, and I co-organized the event.
We had three talks by Anders Eknert, Liga Viskinte, and Ankit Raj and an unconference session.
In the end, we dedicated an hour-long session to an unconference that I led. An unconference is a way of engaging people in an event by ideating on a whiteboard, voting, forming groups, talking, and then presenting.
I started the session by explaining what an unconference is and what I was going to do, “introducing the audience to the process”. Since the event was technical, I chose four categories for people to propose ideas:
- Data/software
- Security
- DevOps/SRE
- Cloud
Then I gave post-it notes and pen to some and whiteboard markers to others to write down their ideas. It was a wonderful experience, in my opinion, where people were proposing ideas and discussing them with those around them.
After a few moments, everyone sat down. Then Abdel and I went to the whiteboards to read the ideas and ask the original ideators to give a concise introduction to the idea. We were interested in the angle they want to approach the idea, in case it is vague or if they want to have a say on their one-liner ideas.
After I went through all the ideas, I reread them and asked people to raise their hands so that I could count their votes. Rereading the ideas proved inefficient. We could have used magnetic pins, so people would be able to vote the moment they were either proposing or reading the ideas from the whiteboard. So, lesson learned.
When the voting was completed, the most-voted ideas were selected to be included in the discussions. We chose four topics:
- Domain-Driven Design (data/software)
- Supply Chain Security (security)
- Terraform vs. others (DevOps/SRE)
- Rules for interacting between Cloud and On-premise workloads/architectures.
I asked people to choose the topic they were most interested in and then joined the group they wanted to discuss it with. I pointed the participants to four different corners of the conference room, where we previously decided to have people form groups. As expected, the team selection, joining, and starting of the discussion happened naturally. After forming groups, the Cloud team was only three people, so they joined forces with the DevOps/SRE to discuss the ideas together, as you can see in the middle picture below.
I jumped between different groups to see what and how they were doing. I would chime in and see if I could be helpful. Sometimes I would listen. We dedicated around 20~25 minutes for the people to have some meaningful thoughts and discussions around those. When the time was up, everyone gathered in the conference room, and we gave each team 5 minutes to present what they discussed in their groups.
I kept time and notified the presenters when they were running out of time. Then I wrapped up the session by getting feedback from the participants. They seemed to like the idea of organizing an event like this, but some had suggestions on how to optimize the whole process, especially the vote-counting part.
I suppose the whole session went well and ticked all the boxes I had in mind: ideation, team building, discussions, presentations, learning, and of course, voting (the democracy).
I highly recommend unconference to any event, whether a company or a community gathering, as it gets people excited and engaged, compared to the talks with a sole speaker. Both are necessary, though.
I would be delighted to have your feedback if you did this before or have ideas about the unconference or any other method for reengaging people into communities.
