Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Uconference model and Dynamical Dialog

Uconference model and Dynamical Dialog

Published by Wesley Fryer in podcasting, web 2.0 on December 12th, 2005

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The upcoming Podcaster Conference in North Carolina (Podcastercon.org scheduled for January 2006) is taking a radically different approach to sharing ideas and networking at a conference. These ten ideas summarize what the organizers are trying to do, and the philosophy with which they are encouraging others to attend and participate. They are trying to operationalize the idea or goal of an “open source conference.” Dave Winer posted about this almost 2 years ago.

The idea seems to be to leverage with maximum effect the power of viral/organic personal networking enabled by both F2F exchanges and web 2.0 technologies. This is centered around the perception that many topics of interest to web 2.0 participants don’t yet have established “experts,” so the goal is to foster more of a collaborative dialog about issues rather than just sit and listen to a guru lecture about their perspectives.

I guess one way to describe what they are trying to create is to call it a “dynamical conference.” Dynamical is a word well-defined by Virginia Postrel in her book “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.” Virginia keeps an active blog also, which I check out from time to time.

WikiPedia has a very nice entry for “dynamical system,” which will give you a flavor of what dynamical interactions are all about. In dynamical systems, outcomes are highly sensitive to initial conditions, which means that the choices which people make (or the changes in a system that just “happen”) really can have a big impact on the direction something takes. I first presented about the idea of education and classrooms being dynamical at TCEA in 2003, in my session “Dynamical Classrooms, Transparent Technology.” I also taught a workshop also last summer including this idea, called “Dynamic Classroom, Transparent Technology.”

Weather systems are both chaotic and dynamical. I think teaching environments are too. Very interesting to learn about conference planners intentionally trying to leverage the power and potential of dynamical personal interactions. I am sure quite a bit will be made available via podcast from this conference, it will be fun to stay tuned and participate in the dialog even though I won’t be attending face to face!