Almost four years ago, I wrote a post about how we needed a BPM unconference. Today, Scott Francis of BP3 announced that they’re organizing one, although it’s focused on Lombardi customers and products. As I said on my comment on his post:
I believe that there is a place for a vendor-independent BPM camp, but using a single vendor’s clients to kick things off is a promising start to test the format. The biggest challenges, I believe, will be encouraging people who are accustomed to being spoon-fed at typical conferences to create and facilitate their own sessions, as well as get the corporate approval necessary for attending an unconference.
I’ve attended a lot of unconferences over the past few years, and the format can really work well if the right framework is in place and attendees are willing to participate [note that by “unconference”, I mean the self-organizing type that use something like Open Space as an organizational framework, not the fake unconferences that are actually pre-scheduled webinars].
I’m very excited to see what happens with this; the time could be right for unconferences to make an impact on the enterprise.
Sandy –
As I responded in the comment on our blog – we think the multi-vendor concept has legs, but we wanted to try it single-vendor first, so that there won’t be any limitations to the discussions that might lose people from different vendor communities.
Afterward we’ll have a good impression of how much really was vendor-specific or benefited from having a vendor-specific-community in attendance.
I am betting that we have critical mass to start getting some unconference -style formats off the ground for BPM. We’ll sure find out!
We’ll certainly appreciate advice and input from others on this event, but I guess I should apologize in advance for all the advice that we end up either failing to take or failing to execute 🙂 We’ll do our best –
scott