Scientists, Unconferences and Culture Clash
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?
Comments
When we organized the first Sci Foo in 2006 there was quite a bit of concern that scientists wouldn't engage openly and informally with each other in the way that technologists do at events like O'Reilly's original Foo Camp. In my view we needn't have worried. As long as you invite people who are (i) genuinely interesting, (ii) mostly haven't met each other before, and (iii) willing to enter into the spirit of a highly informal 'unconference', then it will almost certainly work. Diversity (in terms of expertise, age, nationality, ethnicity, sex, etc.) also helps. In addition, we suggest that people don't live blog (so that they can take full part in the meatspace discussion), and ask them to check before quoting anyone publicly, but after the first Sci Foo we stopped short of applying the full-blown Chatham House Rule as it felt like overkill.
We've also found it useful to encourage attendees to:
* Prepare something to talk about, but aim to speak for no more than 15-20 mins of a 60-min session. Most value comes from the discussion.
* Present early, incomplete and half-baked work and/or thoughts from outside their area of greatest expertise. One of the benefits of unconferences is that they allow people to take these kinds of risks -- much more difficult at a traditional scientific event.
* Bring things to demo. Demos are cool. Demos are fun.
Most important, though: it's the individuals who really matter, not the subject area.
Posted by: Timo Hannay | February 28, 2009 04:51 PM