North Point Online held an UnConference last week at Buckhead Church. It was both an opportunity for the ministry to share and visioncast as well as an opportunity to gather feedback and have creative brainstorming sessions on how to reach the lost and how to best use web technology for the ministry.
I personally had a great time meeting a number of passionate individuals, leading with Scott Mawdesley, drinking some coffee, and having a laugh (or two).
Good times.
I think more online ministries need to spend the time (not too much) to create these local gatherings and “huddles” as they expand their presence online. I know that at North Point Online we’ll be looking to do this much more regularly and I’m pretty excited about that.
On another note I realized very quickly though that not many people have heard or understand what an “UnConference” is. Here are a couple definitions:
From Wikipedia:
An unconference is a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees and sponsored presentations.
An unconference is also very closely related to a barcamp:
BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants.
From 37Signals:
[…] It made me realize that what I really want to attend is an “unconference”, where people pay to come and listen to one (or maybe two) keynotes by prominent community members, but then the rest of the time is spent in unstructured hacking sessions, where people cluster and work together on any number of different projects. If people want to stand up at a mic and talk about something that interests them, that’s fine, but the focus would not be on presentation, but on working on interesting projects.
So there you have it.
Have you been to an unconference lately (doesn’t have to be a church one)? Are you going to “organize” one for your online ministry?
John says
test
djchuang says
Another unconference (hybrid kind) is The Idea Camp. It just gathered this past weekend, and while I don’t have official or unofficial numbers, there were many great conversations around the topic of social justice and compassion. Ongoing conversations continue at http://theideacamp.com and you can review tweets by searching hashtag #icdc
John says
thanks for that DJ! i was unable to attend since i’m so freaking busy…
heard it was good though. were you there?