Last week I attended the Nonprofit Technology Conference for the first time since 2011. I was very impressed with the organization and the the content of the conference, it was great to see how the community has evolved over the years. Along with Tim Nafziger, I co-facilitated a discussion session for members of the NTEN/Nonprofit …
Continue reading "Getting started with Drupal"We held another great NCTech4Good hybrid unconference last week. I especially appreciated the other organizers who displayed teamwork above and beyond the call of duty. Here are a few fun pictures by other folks. You can find more at twitter.com/search?q=nct4g and learn more about it in my previous blog post.
Continue reading "NCT4G Unconference"
As I mentioned in my last blog post, HASTAC is hosting and facilitating the first-ever NCTech4Good Unconference on April 16th. I’ve found that there is a lot of (understandable) confusion about what an “unconference” (or “Barcamp”) is, especially among those who have not experienced them – but sometimes even with those who have.
The history of this idea is less important than how it’s done, but it’s quite interesting and worth mentioning here. This idea was first conceived in the 1980’s as Open Space Technology – a way for participants to organize and conduct their own conferences. The first BarCamp (essentially an unconference for geeks) was held in 2005 in response to the elite FOOCamp that was hosted by tech media mogul Tim O’Reilly. I believe BarCamps were also inspired by the BloggerCons of the early 2000’s which aimed to bring a blog-like dialog into real-life meetings. So that’s enough history, see this Wikipedia entry for lots more fascinating background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Space_Technology .
There are a few specific things that I think are key to a successful unconference…
Continue reading "I (heart) unconferences"