What's an unconference? "The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage."
Good point in theory...often, it's nice to hear the views of "experts" who have researched and worked through a specialized field. If I go to a conference, I want to learn in many ways - from the speakers, from the participants, vendors, etc. This one-mode view of thinking causes me stress. It's true on one level, but false on another.
That seems like a good point you're making. Everybody I talk to loves unconferences, but some middle ground seems like a good idea. I'll tag this post "unconference_problems" in del.icio.us and start a resource list of folks who are concerned about this model being too exteme.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick at March 9, 2006 06:19 PM