Lots of small discussion sessions with 6-20 people.
I personally get the most value of conferences from talking to people. One thing I’ve found works well at unconferences is that there’s more socializing during the ‘talks’. There have been some small discussion groups; I think these were quite useful, but I feel they often wandered more than they should have and quality decreased over time.
I’d propose something more like there be 20-minute or 30-minute specific discussion groups led by one person, scheduled back-to-back in 5-30 rooms. Maybe some could be exclusive to specific sets of people (VCs, entrepreneurs).
This is a great idea. There were some tables for animal welfare, XRisk, etc. in the main hall at EAG, and a few ad-hoc discussion groups were put together from the email list in the EAG Connect spreadsheet, but formalizing this a bit more and maybe adding a loose agenda to them would be a good idea.
One idea is to do the same thing as this year with EAG Connect, but then let people choose one cause to be in a discussion group about, for which one time slot during the conference is reserved for 20-person groups (maybe 10-15 will show up) to discuss the cause. I think that could be very valuable and maybe a more specific way for people to meet people who care about the cause they’re interested in.
Strongly agree about creating schelling points for specific types of conversations (specific ‘topics’ might be too narrowing). Simply having signs up in the common area could probably have accomplished most of the benefit for minimal cost.
Lots of small discussion sessions with 6-20 people.
I personally get the most value of conferences from talking to people. One thing I’ve found works well at unconferences is that there’s more socializing during the ‘talks’. There have been some small discussion groups; I think these were quite useful, but I feel they often wandered more than they should have and quality decreased over time.
I’d propose something more like there be 20-minute or 30-minute specific discussion groups led by one person, scheduled back-to-back in 5-30 rooms. Maybe some could be exclusive to specific sets of people (VCs, entrepreneurs).
This is a great idea. There were some tables for animal welfare, XRisk, etc. in the main hall at EAG, and a few ad-hoc discussion groups were put together from the email list in the EAG Connect spreadsheet, but formalizing this a bit more and maybe adding a loose agenda to them would be a good idea.
One idea is to do the same thing as this year with EAG Connect, but then let people choose one cause to be in a discussion group about, for which one time slot during the conference is reserved for 20-person groups (maybe 10-15 will show up) to discuss the cause. I think that could be very valuable and maybe a more specific way for people to meet people who care about the cause they’re interested in.
Strongly agree about creating schelling points for specific types of conversations (specific ‘topics’ might be too narrowing). Simply having signs up in the common area could probably have accomplished most of the benefit for minimal cost.
There actually were signs up for different broad topics in the common area.