BRX Pro Tip: The Un-Conference
Stone Payton: And we are back with Business RadioX Pro Tips, Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, I’ve come across this term before, but I want to hear more about your perspective and what you’re learning about this idea of the unconference.
Lee Kantor: Yeah, the unconference. I remember the first time I was part of one or even heard of it was early, early on the Business RadioX kind of birth, that a lot of the startup community and the tech space were having these kind of unconferences, and this is a way to kind of radically rethink what an event can be.
Lee Kantor: So, an unconference flips the script on a traditional event by prioritizing connection, participation, and kind of fresh formats over kind of your standard panel discussions and presentations, and a lot of prescheduled things with speakers and things like this. And the way you do this is instead of designing for just education, you want to design for interactivity.
Lee Kantor: An unconference isn’t a place where passive listening happens and somebody is talking to a big room. What you’re trying to do is facilitate small group dialogs, and you want to replace kind of those long lectures with roundtable discussions or peer-to-peer brainstorming, or I think they called it an unpanel, where every attendee can contribute, not just one person.
Lee Kantor: A way to kind of do this is you have to kind of lean into the chaos and trust the group that you’re putting together. So, you want to crowdsource the agenda. You want the attendees to submit session topics, questions, or problems that they want to solve in advance. And you let the community vote on which of the sessions that you’re going to be running.
Lee Kantor: So, by embracing this kind of anti-conference mindset and focusing in on participation, surprise, and action, you’re really going to create or you have a chance to create a really memorable experience that turns every community event into a catalyst for new ideas, new relationships, and more engagement.
