Citcon

[Richard Vowles]

In response to the tweet, "Can you elaborate on that?" - sure :-)

CITCON is a day and a half conference. It meets on the Friday night to have everyone introduce themselves, why they are there and what they are intending to get out of the conference. The organizers explain what an unconference is and how it works. Then the floor gets opened up for people to propose topics to be discussed and stick them on the board with sticky notes. They can get challenged along the way, but no merging happens at this point. 

Once the initial discussion is over, people start merging the topics - everyone can be involved. Typically, after a short while of this, people migrate to a bar with the whiteboard and merging continues. I don't see this phase happening with our (Exceptional http://exceptionalconf.info) conference this weekend, but we'll see.

Usually there is some jockying throughout the following day as well as the day wears on, but it means you have a conference designed by the attendees about topics the attendees are interested and they can dive straight in. 

I've been to two citcons, and its worked great. Some people here have been to more, and I'm going to encourage them to run the conference for this weekend (hint hint John and Mark). 

I felt last year's Auckland one suffered pretty badly from not having any initial real organisation or group discussion of topics. That and no wifi (which I have solved for this conference and would be happy to lend out to other conferences).

Richard

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Richard Vowles,
Grails, Groovy, Java
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