Category: Professional Development

Yesterday an enlightening thing happened in the comments on a blog post by Steve Lawson (a post which is positively ancient in blog years, by the way). Up until yesterday, I’d rather naively thought that even though the terms “unconference” and “library camp” are still in their toddlerhood, people generally had a common understanding of what those terms mean. In my head, this common definition went something like this: An informal, free or low cost, loosely structured gathering at which people share knowledge with each other. I would hear “unconference” and have an image of people gathering at the beginning of the day to figure out what they wanted to learn that day and which of them could lead sessions on those agreed-on topics.

Now I see that people may not, in fact, have a common understanding of the term “unconference.” The comments on Steve’s post point to at least three different interpretations: Unconferences are loosely structured conferences, Unconferences are grassroots gatherings, and Unconferences are a genre rather than a format. Here’s what I mean…

• Unconferences as loosely structured conferences
  If you think of a conference, you know that there are all kinds of logistics that go into pulling one of those things off, most of which depend to a large degree on how many people you want to attend. Everything from spaces to staffing to the number of speakers to the relative rock-start status of your speakers to the rigidity of the schedule has to be geared toward attracting and handling your target audience. If you plan for 100 people and only 40 show up, that’s a huge waste of capital. Bring this mindset to an unconference and you end up with less worry about rock-star speakers (though a few recent unconferences have had Big Names give keynote addresses), but most of the same issues remain your primary concern. The major thing that changes, then, is that the unconference organizers spend little to no time planning out sessions topics, leaving that up to the attendees.
• Unconferences as grassroots gatherings
  Other people, while still having to deal with logistics, consciously force those logistics into the background of the event. They still need space and people, obviously, but if they plan for 100 and 40 show up, those 40 might not even notice that you had enough room for more than twice their number. Those 40 would gather, decide what they want to learn and which of them can facilitate that learning, and then learn it, usually for free (with the space and other necessities paid for by donors or sponsors).
• Unconferences as a genre rather than a format
  Still others (myself included) think of unconferences as a genre of gathering which may or may not include a keynote address, may or may not charge a small fee, and may or may not have an over-arching theme. This genre places the emphasis on attendee-driven content, but other than that, it no more dictates the size or cost or logistical complexity than does the parent term “conference.” As Steve says, an unconference “can be whatever the attendees decide it is” (citation).

Luckily, the solution to all the muddled assumptions is transparency. So if I see an unconference coming up, and I see that it will charge me a small fee and what that fee will go towards, I can make my own decisions about the value of that unconference in my life. If I see that it will be of the loosely-structured-conference variety, and I’m ok with that, that’s great. If I see that it’ll be a completely unstructured day of serendipitous learning with other librarians, and I’m ok with that, that’s great too. After all, not all conferences are like ALA Annual, so why must all unconferences be as diametrically opposed to Annual as possible?

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It’s a curious thing, going to a conference. A healthy chunk of the presenters are people I know and talk with all the time, so I’m often familiar with their topics and sometimes even with their approaches. And yet, the experience of going, sitting, and attending sessions back to back, hour after hour, day after day is still enlightening. It’s not so much that I learned new facts (though there was a little of that, too). No, it’s that when you sit through that many sessions, themes emerge from the periphery, gather form and substance, and finally strut around in all their splendor.

The theme that emerged most strongly for me at this conference was ethnography. Previous conferences have trumpeted tools, change, and stories, but this is the first time that I saw a collective desire to understand what it means to inhabit this online world.

Rather than lead us on tours of tools and services, more than one presenter echoed Cliff Landis’ statement that it’s not enough to have an account any more, you have to participate. Over and over we heard about presenting ourselves as humans online, not as institutions. Sometimes this means presenting yourself as a professional (Elizabeth Edwards’ session on an ethnography of Facebook made this point),* but even professionals have personality, and personality is as important online as off. danah boyd spoke compellingly about how an online profile is our digital body that we adorn as if we were getting dressed in the morning.** And both Greg and I spoke about online identity.

Not only are we finally taking a closer look at what it means to inhabit these online spaces, but the online spaces are becoming more integrated with our off-line spaces. As the two worlds come closer together, as the process of switching from one to the other becomes less and less of an action that requires thought and decision, and as computing becomes more and more ubiquitous, these issues of social norms and interpersonal interactions are bubbling to the surface and commanding our attention. How refreshing! This was the first conference in a long while that didn’t rely primarily on listing Tools You Should Know and instead concentrated on interacting with people online.

* A very similar presentation to the one we saw was blogged here.
**For excellent notes on this talk, see Jenica’s blog.

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I’ve noticed a curious trend here at Internet Librarian. Those sessions led by LSW members are consistently of high quality. They were informative, humorous, to the point, and organized. Those sessions led by non-LSW members are a very mixed bag. A couple were brilliant (I’m thinking of danah boyd, especially). A few were definitely not.

One explanation could be that we’ve managed to amass a group of cool librarians that are also good presenters. And while I think this is definitely true, I don’t think it’s the whole story. For one thing, if this were the whole story, I’d expect to see improvement in those of us who’ve spoken a lot, and I’d expect to see newer presenters from the group playing a bit of catch-up. I’m not really seeing that, though. It seems like the entire group, veteran and newbie speakers alike, churned out really high-quality work.

My theory is that the fact that we keep up with each other online, and the fact that we all know and respect each other, enticed everyone to step up and make sure that what they presented would be top notch. Put simply, everyone was proving to everyone else that they were cool enough to belong in the group. Even those who had never spoken at a national conference before had a reputation to maintain in front of a crowd of seriously talented, smart, and funny peers.

There’s a down-side to this network effect, too. We generally knew a lot of the facts presented already, since we’d already presented them to our peers online. Still, I heard several things expressed in person in ways that I hadn’t heard online. And the sheer mass of presentations and discussions juxtaposed against each other highlighted some trends that I would probably have missed otherwise.

The conference is over now, and we’re all scattering back to our respective homes. The conversation about librarianship will continue, though, as we keep up with each other online. I wonder what this means for the quality of next year’s conference. Only good things, I imagine.

Next up: actual information from sessions. I promise. I’m working on it.

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I now understand the cult of Internet Librarian. People have been telling me for years that I needed to come, and for years I’ve very prudently stayed away to tend my collection of panicky Fall Term students. But this year I was asked if I wanted to help lead a pre-conference workshop here with pretty much the best group of people ever, and so here I am, and it is wonderful.

I wake up every morning (far too early, I might add, due to the craziness that is the Pacific Time Zone) to the sound of the sea lions singing to each other. There’s good sea food. There’s good company. And there have been several really interesting sessions so far. I might even get around to blogging about a couple of them soon. For example, there was a great session on an ethnographic study that a team at George Washington University did to see how students used Facebook and how librarians might appropriately fit into that world. It’s always great when somebody backs up hunches about the way things work with actual research.

But more on that next time I have a good wireless signal.

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