{"id":11183,"date":"2014-10-17T13:58:51","date_gmt":"2014-10-17T12:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/?p=11183"},"modified":"2014-10-17T13:58:51","modified_gmt":"2014-10-17T12:58:51","slug":"lets-do-an-unconference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/ofschemesandmemes\/2014\/10\/17\/lets-do-an-unconference","title":{"rendered":"Let’s do an unconference"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Guest Post by Martin Fenner.
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\nMartin Fenner\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/strong>is the technical lead for the PLOS Article-Level Metrics project. Before taking this position in 2012 he worked as a medical oncologist at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany. He has served on the ORCID Board from 2010 to 2012 and is a member of the ORCID Outreach Steering Group.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This year\u2019s\u00a0SpotOn London conference<\/a>\u00a0takes place November 14-15 and registration opened this Monday. I have been\u00a0helping to organize this conference since 2009, and I again look forward to the sessions, and \u2013 more importantly \u2013 the discussions with people in and between sessions this year.<\/p>\n

The name (ScienceBlogging London, ScienceOnline London, SpotOn London), the location (Royal Institution, British Library, Wellcome Conference Center), the people organizing (too many to mention, but Nature Publishing Group always at the core), and the fringe events (lots of cool things from\u00a0science tours<\/a>\u00a0toStory Collider<\/a>) and the format have always changed slightly over the years, and this year again is a bit different. The biggest change is obviously that\u00a0Lou Woodley<\/a>\u00a0is no longer an organizer (as she announced at last year\u2019s conference), but this is also the first SpotOn conference with a theme:<\/p>\n

The challenges of balancing the public and the private in the digital age<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is obviously a very broad topic, but nicely encompasses many important issues that we are dealing with in scholarly communication today. The draft program is posted\u00a0here<\/a>, and I\u2019m helping organize the sessions on\u00a0sharing sensitive data<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0open peer review<\/strong>. More details will follow for all these sessions.<\/p>\n

The second day of the conference will be in unconference (or barcamp) format and the program drafted by the delegates in the morning. This format is popular in the science communications community (I first heard about the project that became my current job at\u00a0SciBarCamp in 2009<\/a>), and SpotOn London has used this format in the first conference in 2008 (and again in 2009):<\/p>\n

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\nFlickr photo by Duncan Hull<\/a>\u00a0 <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For people not familiar with this format the idea of a conference (day) without predetermined topics or speakers sounds scary. As it turns out, the problem is usually not the lack of ideas or people wanting to talk, but rather how to coordinate this in a way that everyone who wants to get involved can do so, and it doesn\u2019t become a discussion among those with the loudest voices (and biggest egos). My experience with SpotOn London and other conferences I enjoyed is that the best sessions are usually those that allow for a good discussion, and not those with the most polished PowerPoint slides. Some suggestions for when you attend an unconference for the first time:<\/p>\n