What I love most about Open Space (Un)Conferences
I am sure that if you have ever got engaged in a discussion about Open Space vs One-Way Conferences, you have already listened to many arguments about how knowledge sharing is done better with Open Space and how the sessions remain on track with the traditional conference format etc. I can understand all these but me, personally, I prefer Open Space for two reasons.
The first is about real human relations and the second is about boredom.
Last week I was participating #AgileCrete. An Open Space (Un)conference about agile, scrum, kanban and all the related stuff. It was the second year this event is organized in one of the most lovely places in the world, in Crete, Greece :). The thing I enjoyed most though, was not that I learned so many new things, neither that I had the opportunity to discuss about how agile works for different types of companies.
The most enjoyable part was that I created real relations and had real communication with people from different parts of the world.
I don’t want to underestimate the power of knowledge and experience sharing, especially when it is done between people from different industries having strong and justified opinions. But I strongly believe that it is much more important to develop relationships that will last much longer that the 3 days of the event. And this is what I think we achieved at AgileCrete and what Open Space events have to offer versus the well structured “One-way” conferences. It is really nice and challenging to start a discussion about Agile, going next to porn industry and concluding discussing about the responsibility of IT people at an information based world. This can’t be done at a normal conference, either because it is really structured or because people are not that relaxed.
The second reason is boredom. Yes that’s right, I usually get bored at One-Way conferences but never at Open Space ones. The main reason has nothing to do with the speaker or the topic but with the format. It is easy to get distracted and start playing with your mobile or get sleepy when you sit on a chair and you are not supposed to do anything apart from listening. You may think that I don’t really care about what other people talk or that I suffer from some kind of (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder — ADHD). No, I don’t, but I think it’s normal to get bored when you are not actually involved or engaged and this is the reason most of the successful speakers try to keep audience involved.
I don’t really know if this Open Space format is suitable for all conferences but for me it is really one of the criteria I take into consideration when I want to decide which conference to attend and which not.
