Conference or Unconference ?
Partilhar.
Conference or Unconference? What You Need to Know Before Signing Up for an Event
"What if I don't know what to say?"
Let's start here, because this is where most people hesitate before signing up for an event.
You've heard the word "unconference" and your first reaction was a mix of curiosity and anxiety. No fixed agenda? No confirmed speakers? Where are the certainties of a normal conference — the program, the schedule, the session titles you can read in advance and decide if they're worth your time?
If this gives you a knot in your stomach, you're not alone. It's the most common reaction, and it's completely rational. We've all been trained to associate value with structure: the more defined an event's program, the more "serious" it seems. An unconference looks like the opposite of that — it looks like chaos.
Except it isn't. And the most common fears all have answers:
"I don't have anything relevant to share."
You don't need to be an expert to propose a session topic. You need a genuine question, a problem you're trying to solve, or a curiosity that other people in the room probably share too. The best unconference sessions are born from questions, not ready-made answers.
"I'll be left not knowing what to do."
There's always a minimal structure — usually a session board that fills up at the start of the event day, with defined time slots for each block. The freedom is in the content, not in total chaos.
"What if nobody shows up to my session?"
In an unconference, this has a name and its own rule: the Law of Two Feet. If a session isn't serving you — whether you proposed it or you're just attending — you have explicit permission to get up and move somewhere else. Nobody takes offense. That's exactly how the format was designed to work.
If one last doubt remains, hold onto it. It usually disappears within the first twenty minutes of the event.
What is a conference, exactly
A traditional conference-format event follows a broadcast logic: someone prepared content in advance, steps onto a stage (physical or virtual), and the audience receives it. There's a closed program, speakers confirmed weeks or months ahead, and Q&A at the end if there's time left.
It's an efficient format for transmitting already-validated knowledge, well-structured case stories, and inspiration from people who've already walked the path. It works particularly well when the event's goal is to learn from someone who already knows.
What is an unconference
An unconference flips the logic: instead of pre-defined content delivered to a passive audience, the event's agenda is built by the people in the room, on the day itself. Formats like Open Space Technology popularized this — someone proposes a topic, writes it on a board, people choose where they want to be, and conversations happen in small, fluid groups.
There's no stage. There are circles of chairs. There's no "those who know more" talking down to "those who know less" — just peers working through similar problems, in real time.
The advantages of each event format
Conference:
- Prepared, tested content, lower risk of "wasted time"
- Easy to decide in advance what's worth attending
- Good for inspiration and a big-picture view of a topic
Unconference:
- The conversation goes exactly where the room needs it to go in that moment
- Much deeper networking — you talk to people who share your specific problem, not whoever happened to sit next to you
- Nobody leaves having heard what they already knew; the content adjusts to the level of whoever's in the room
- Lower production cost, since the event doesn't depend on convincing dozens of speakers to prepare slides months in advance
Three real events that prove the format works
Theory is nice, but what really convinces skeptics is seeing the format in action. Over the past few years I've organized and taken part in several unconference-format events, and each one shows a different facet of why this works.
#play14 — serious play, among professionals
#play14 was born in Luxembourg in 2014 and is now an international non-profit movement, with editions in dozens of cities across dozens of countries. It's an event dedicated to games and playful practices for facilitators, agile coaches, trainers, and HR teams — and at its core, it's an unconference built around Open Space Technology.
I have the privilege of organizing editions of #play14, and what strikes me most, edition after edition, is watching the room's energy shift the moment people realize the program is theirs. At #play14 there's no passive audience: every participant is also a potential game facilitator, and the "Law of Two Feet" is taken so seriously that if a session runs too long, the group itself will jokingly chant for the facilitator to wrap it up. That only happens because people feel the event belongs to them, not because it's a show they're watching from the outside.
Agile Lean Europe (ALE) — an unconference that travels across Europe
Agile Lean Europe is an open network of communities connected to Agile and Lean thinking, and its flagship event — the ALE Unconference — takes place every year in a different European city, organized by volunteers from the local community. Like #play14, it runs on Open Space: there's no closed list of invited speakers, and the day's program emerges from the proposals of whoever is present.
What ALE shows well is scale: hundreds of people from dozens of countries, often bringing their families along, manage to co-create a relevant agenda within a few hours, every year, in a new city. That's only possible because the format doesn't depend on a central organization that already knows what matters — it depends on the knowledge distributed across the community that shows up.
Agile Coach Camp Portugal (ACC PT) — the unconference we brought here
After the Agile Coach Camp format had already traveled through countries like the United States, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain, I helped bring it to Portugal. ACC PT follows the same principle: no visitors, only participants. Everyone arrives with their own experience, their own doubts, and their own real problems, and the two-and-a-half-day agenda is built on site, based on what the Portuguese agile community most needs to discuss in that moment.
What I've learned organizing ACC PT is that the organizer's role changes radically in this kind of event: once the venue, the food, and a minimal structure are in place, the work shifts to the participants. And that, year after year, has been enough to generate some of the most honest and useful conversations I've seen at a professional event in Portugal.
Why the unconference format works
It's not magic, it's design. Three principles explain why — and the three examples above show them in practice:
1. People engage more with what they helped create. At #play14, ALE, and ACC PT, anyone who proposes a session and sees other people show up because they chose to be there — not because it was on the program — feels a level of energy and participation that's structurally different from a passive audience.
2. The right knowledge is already in the room. In any of these three events, the relevant experience is never only in the organizers' hands. It's spread across the participants. The format is a mechanism for that experience to emerge without months of speaker curation.
3. Self-organization reduces waste. Instead of a committee guessing months ahead what will matter, the group itself — whether at #play14, ALE, or ACC PT — adjusts the agenda to whatever's actually relevant in that moment, before, during, and between sessions.
So, will you sign up for the next event?
Not every conversation needs a stage. Sometimes the best session at an event is the one that doesn't have a name yet — because it hasn't been proposed yet. And it might just be yours.