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by Teresa Martin

So Saturday was the first really nice day this year. Sunny, warm, birds chirping, bits of green pushing up from the snow-melted earth ... And where was I during this delightful day? Cleaning the garden? Taking a nice walk on the beach? Nooo, I was proving that the inner geek is taking up with the inner wonk.

I was at an un-conference.

About Government 2.0.

Wait, don't run away! This is way more interesting than it sounds! For starters, there's the whole concept of an un-conference.

That's right the UNconference.

Now, we've all been to zillions of conferences, right? Someone gathers some speakers about some topics that someone thought were interesting. If all the stars align just right, then the speaker chemistry is great, the topics are engaging, and we all walk away raving. On the other hand ...

Well, you all know about the other hand.

It's where you end up drawing extensive doodles across the notepaper and wonder if anyone will notice if you quietly creep out the back, even it will make you feel guilty.

It's that place where the vendor on the panel won't stop promoting her product, where another panelist thinks he is god and won't stop talking, and where the moderator never held a microphone before. Yeeks.

You always come away from these saying that all the interesting conversations happened between sessions and afterward at the bar.

Enter the un-conference.

Un-conferences starting appearing about five years ago. An un-conference is a gathering, usually free and without predefined agendas. The most well known of the original un-conferences is FooCamp, an annual hacker event hosted by publisher O'Reilly Media.

Un-conferences focus on a topic or theme, usually technical in nature -- things like a web development environment or an open source tool.

It's a whole other way of thinking about gatherings. In fact, it's an awful lot like being in a sort of real world 3D social networking environment. You are your own avatar, meeting, talking, texting, getting input from your mobile devices, a conference overhead, a white board, and the guy sitting next to you all at the same time.

The participants are the speakers and the speakers are the participants. Let me say that again: Speaker = participant; participant = speaker.

Just like social networks, there's an implied equality. Unlike the typical conference, where the speakers get special ribbons and are looked at as the experts, in an un-conference everyone is part of the mix.

And participants themselves create the agenda, with proposed topics being moved around and decided upon at the start of the day by the group.

The Government 2.0 un-conference was hosted by Harvard Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy and held in the Kennedy School building in Cambridge. There were about 300 people coming and going throughout the day (hint: that means I'm not the only weird one out there!)

I have to tell you, I didn't know what to expect.

I was picturing chaos. But what I was forgetting is that in chaos, we'll always create order. It's like that old experiment, where you tell a group to start clapping hands randomly and within moments everyone is clapping in time with everyone else.

I groaned to myself when the first order of business was introductions. The room was filled! But three words - literally - went fast and created a real sense of who was here and why. And it set the stage for setting the day's agenda.

Three or four dozen people queued up to propose a topic. Geo-enabling Gov 2.0 ... Democratizing Data ... Participation in Democracy ... Using online tools for community organizing ... Connecting citizens and government through data visualization ... Open data strategies ... The public meeting redefined ...

Facilitators wrote the proposed topics on big stickies, stuck them onto a white board into a time slot and consolidated similar topics. A show of hands very quickly voted a topic in or out.

And guess what? No one expected anyone to stay in one place. It was actually OK to leave a session and go to another one if the topic didn't work for you. And you could walk in late without taking on 100 accusing eyes.

It's not fair to say unconferences 'just happen," though.

There's a core group of organizers who pick an overall topic, get the word out to interested people, make sure there's a place to meet and coffee to drink. They prepare a few sample agenda items and keep the day moving along. In this case they also pre-organized a handful of dead-stop-at-5-minutes presentations to get things rolling.

Like social media, the un-conference is about the little moments. I didn't walk away with Pearls of Wisdom, but I did walk away with a dozen interesting thoughts, some cool examples, and some people I hope to keep talking to.

For me, the harvest from the un-conference was worth the day. And on the next nice day, I'll garden and walk the beach and percolate on the Un in the Conference.