technowonk

photo of whiteboard - WIRED schedule development

Further to David’s excellent post about why an unconference (and WIREDcamp specifically) is so cool I thought I’d take a moment and go over, from a practical point of view, what you can expect at WIREDcamp.

Location, location, location

We’ve secured a space in the north building of the MTCC, if you’re familiar with the convention centre then you’ll know that the north building is closer to front street, giving attendees easier access to coffee shops, restaurants, and perhaps most importantly, the delicious chip trucks that congregate in front of the convention centre. Also, the bulk of showcase occurs in the south building, so WIREDcamp will have some breathing room from the hubbub of the main event and all the vendors trying to sell us the latest and greatest widget.

The space is big enough for 200 people, although we’re aiming for somewhere between 75 – 140 participants (we’d love to get more, so tell your friends and colleagues!) We really want to diversify the crowd, so if you know anyone working in the public sector outside the OPS who may be interested, please let me know and I’ll send them the invite code for non-OPS’ers. When you arrive you’ll find a room with chairs arranged in a roughly circular fashion, with smaller break out areas lining the walls and the perimeter. Also, on one wall you’ll notice the grid, which is an important part of any unconference and is what we’ll use to organize our time together.

Unconference – unwired (internet access)

Normally nobody gets access to the WiFi network at showcase, but we’re really demanding clients for the showcase folks and managed to convince them that yes, you really need wifi access in order to run an unconference. Not only will you be able to connect your favourite WiFi devices to the internet at WIREDcamp, but we should have plenty of electrical outlets available to charge your devices with too.

We’re doing this of course so we can all document the event on the fly. Post to twitter (i’m thinking #wiredcamp is a decent hash-tag), upload photos to flickr (#wiredcamp tagged please!), upload videos to your favourite video service, and embedd all this into the upcoming very unofficial and very temporary WIREDcamp website (we wanted to do it on OPSpedia, but we won’t have intranet access so boo).

Speaking of our unofficial and temporary website, keep an eye open, I’m working on getting something setup which we can all access from the internet to document WIREDcamp (check out how changecamp did it for what we’re aiming for) in a way that can later be easily imported into OPSpedia.

A very rough itinerary

Here’s the schedule we’re hoping to go with:

• participants arrive 8:30 – 9am
• 9am – 9:30 opening remarks by the organizers (that’s me and Lara in case you weren’t paying attention
• 9:30 – 10:30 – small randomly assigned groups answering the question “What does public service mean to you?”
• 10:30 – 11:00 – one person stays, the rest mingle and find out how other groups answered
• 11:00 – noon – The grid – explain how the grid works, start filling it out as a group
• LUNCH! (ahem – budget includes coffee and snacks during the event – but not lunch. this is where proximity to front street is a good thing)
• 1pm – session 1 OR Keynote by Richard Florida @ Showcase
• 2pm – 2:50pm – session 2
• 2:50 pm – 3:40pm – session 3
• 3:40 – 4:00 – What did we learn? – Closing statements by organizers

REGISTER!

That’s it for now, we’ll be sharing more details as we get the work done. PLEASE REGISTER! If you’re interested in coming but aren’t sure you can spend the whole day don’t worry! We aren’t locking the doors and you’ll be free to come and go, but if you don’t register in advance we won’t have any idea of how many people are coming, and we might then not order enough coffee and snacks. Also you don’t have to be a “web person” to come, in fact, if you aren’t one then we definitely need you to come and share your thoughts and opinions!