Yesterday Debbie, Steve and I hosted our second Product for the People unconference in Cardiff. The aim of these events is to bring product people (and people interested in product) from across the broadest definition of public service together in a safe space to learn, share and support each other. We had people from central and local government, suppliers, charities and beyond – about 40 people spending the day chatting and chewing on some big problems and undertaking a little group therapy as well 🙂

I’ve been involved in ‘unconferences’ in one role or another for a long time now (since 2006 I think) – certainly since we just called them BarCamps and as recently as last week I was at GovCamp Cymru. 

Recently I’ve started to miss the slightly scrappier, minimalist unconferences of those early years and the sense of experimentation that existed then. Sometimes I worry that as unconferences have got better organised and awareness has grown (though to be honest they remain niche AF!) they are starting to buckle under the weight of expectation to deliver a particular, almost professionalised, experience. All the sponsors, volunteers, notetakers, questions at sign-ups, lanyards, badges. lunches…I understand that this is all a function of scale – as more and more people give up their time for these events more and more scaffolding is needed to make it coalesce…but all I really want from an unconference is a participant generated agenda, a safe space to chat and a bunch of good people.

Anyway I wanted to use this event as an opportunity to try and approach things in a more lightweight manner. The numbers were small, the attendees were mainly new to unconferences so had no expectations and we only had a couple of rooms so we were never going to have a massive grid to manage.

So we did a few things differently – 

• We didn’t ask for volunteers. I shanghaied a couple of my team to help with the shopping but otherwise Debbie, Steve and I did everything else – honestly if you can’t trust a group of Product People to self organise when asked who can you trust!
  
• This was possible because we didn’t assign note-takers or anything like that. If anyone wanted to capture things that was cool but we wanted everyone to be in the sessions not observing them.
  
• We defaulted to traditional pitching but the lack of unconference veterans meant we had a lot of rabbit in the headlight stares and only a couple of people stepping up. So we pivoted and dished out the (crappy) Post-Its to everyone and asked them to take 5 mins to write ideas down and stick them on the wall. Steve then talked them through, people asked a few clarification questions, we dot voted and then did a live logistics sort for the agenda – all in 30 minutes (the benefit of only 40ish folks). Honestly this worked really well and I suspect we won’t return to traditional pitching at these events.
  
• We built in a lot of ‘space’ for corridor conversations and encouraged people to take the opportunity to have those side chats.
  
• We didn’t provide lunch – but we did have snacks, fruit, soft drinks, water and coffee.

Amazingly given the informal approach and the slightly haphazard planning we managed to stay dead on time throughout the day and we were in the pub by 4.30 where about 20 of us carried on the conversations of the day fueled by beer and pizza (thanks Zero Degrees).

At our next event in Manchester (sometime in the Autumn) we might experiment with the forma further – I’m particularly interested in seeing what the appetite is for adding a ‘pitch’ requirement to the signup and then a pre-event vote – so we can hit the ground running on the day?

Anyway it was a lovely day and the only slight sour note was around 20 people failed to show up and didn’t bother to let us know. I understand things happen but the lack of communications was disappointing. 

If you came along, thanks for making it such a success. 

Onwards.