TelecomONE Innovation Unconference 2011

I had no idea what to expect. I wasn’t even entirely sure what an Unconference was until Nat Torkington (our conference advisor) posted a link to an Unconference Wikipedia entry on Twitter late last week :

An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term “unconference” has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization. For example, in 2006, CNNMoney applied the term to diverse events including Foo Camp, BarCamp, Bloggercon, and Mashup Camp.

I headed up to Warkworth (north of Auckland) late on Friday.
I had missed Nat’s introduction to the Unconference and how things were going to work however it was pretty easy to see how fluid and participant driven the weekend was going to be.

Brightly coloured slips of paper with session ideas were thrown on a board and were being grouped together if and where possible.

First Impressions

On Friday night I went in to a session on sourcing information from our customers and how to both invite and use our customers to provide information for us.
This was my first ever experience of an Unconference session and boy did it really set me alight.  Here we sat around and talked about things – but more importantly about how to get things done.
No one was saying “we can’t do that – that’s not possible”

I would have loved to stay around on the Friday night however I drove back to Auckland for the evening (late – but well awake and excited on the drive home) and then I headed up to Warkworth again on Saturday morning.

As a side note – what a BEAUTIFUL weekend!!  The sun was out – it was just stunning.

Our first session on Saturday morning was a Social Media session.
And when we arrived the session had moved from the allocated room outside to the courtyard.

We discussed what a corporate’s social media policy should be – how we let communications flow and then started down a track of how we could help people find others in their organisation who were naturally online.
The idea of making use of the people around you and using their strengths and passions was a pretty regular theme.

And the point is?

What I really got from this weekend is the knowledge that there are around 100 other people out there in my circles that think the same way I do.  Ideas for change spring from all parts of our lives.
Through talking about our hobbies and lives and our passions and some subjects that irk us, we can break from the norm and imagine not being held back.  We can imagine and decide on how to change.

I talked photography – A LOT of photography.  I talked movies and music.  I talked charities and education and training.
And I talked about Coverage Maps and Coverage Apps and API’s.
Search the hashtag #tnz1 if you are looking for a pretty good summary of how those that were there summed up their sessions.
(If you are really not sure what all the #werewolves and #lynching references mean – just ask me)

Sure the event is called TelecomONE – but it is also called the Innovation Unconference.

Innovation is the key.

Innovation means renew and change.  It also means creating better and more effective.
In order to breed innovation, we need to breed change.  And that means realising that the way we do things now, is not neccesarily the way that we should do it tomorrow.

I love that my company hosts this event each year – to not only see how we can enable the company to be more innovative, but that my company enables me to to more innovative at the same time.

Sigh me up for 2012!