How many conferences have you been to where a head table of presenters opened with dry, over-cautious remarks, and things only got interesting during the audience Q and A?

Alex, blogging from AdvocacyDev II, is delighted at the tack the organizers — a duo called Aspiration Tech — took:

Their approach is to bring a whole bunch of interesting people together and let them drive and structure discussions. No talking head panels here: session topics have emerged out of the interests and needs of the people in the room, and each discussion has been a mix of brainstorming, case sharing, strategy sharing, putting questions out for feedback, and coming up with really concrete ideas for projects and next steps.

This ties in with a discussion unfolding on several blogs on “unconferences”, including a thought-provoking podcast conversation from Johnnie Moore, who asks “how can we get away from unsatisfying conferences where the audience is often bored, towards much more engaging learning events?”

From the shownotes:

0.40 Chris reflects on the frustrations of conferences as usual, which have been highlighted by bloggers who are used to a more flexible way of sharing ideas and knowledge, yet find those processes seem to stop in conferences.

1.18 Chris talks about “keynote facilitation” instead of keynote speaking. How this changes the whole approach, and can work with low and high tech systems to help conferences reflect the social interaction of the blogosphere.

1.58 Rob describes a conference where he reinvented the role of keynote speaker at a conference to be more facilitative – and how this generated very lively conversation between participants, tapping into all the wisdom in the room – “that felt quite different from sitting, being presented at”.

2.53 Rob continues to describe another conference Zap Your PRAM on Prince Edward Island, where “everybody was a presenter, everybody had content, everybody was heard.”

This approach isn’t for everyone. There will always be conference audiences that expect and want a pretty passive experience. Others would prefer to know what they’re getting into right from the start, and avoid spending time on process — particularly if that would reopen a fragile consensus or bog the event down in factional wrangling.

And it isn’t all or nothing. A first day of structured activity that then informs a more free-flowing agenda could work well.

But having been to enough conferences where a rigid agenda and top-down approach failed to engage audiences — and allowed a lot of wisdom in the crowd to lie fallow — I’d love to attend an Aspiration event.