Unconference your Birthday: the background story.

It might sound shocking to some, organising a conference in honour of my 30th birthday, but it turned out to be one of the best workshops I ever had.

OK, here’s the background story of why we came up with the idea. Turning 30 seemed like an excellent mark in time to throw a party, a thing I almost never do for my birthday. Last year we organised a barbeque party for Ton’s birthday and invited people from different circles of friends. And you know what? It turned out to be a very nice party. This year we wanted to scale things up.

Last year we invited our international friends living in the vicinity of Enschede, mostly foreigners living in Holland. This year we invited people we became friends with, had good conversations with, hosted us, are part of the usual suspects at several conferences, even clients, from across the globe. We thought that a party alone would not be enough incentive for people across Europe, or even from North-America, to travel all the way to Enschede. We discussed what we could do to make it more attractive for people to attend. That’s when the idea of organising a conference/workshop popped up. On the one hand to offer our ‘local’ network to get to know our international network, on the other hand to be able to pick eachother’s brains for a whole day. We know so many intelligent people.

Over several dinners Ton and I talked about setting a general topic. We wanted it to be relevant to all attending (not all people we know are immersed in Web 2.0), so we came up with this ‘vague’ idea: “Wouldn’t it be cool to talk about work-life balance? And the part all these communication technologies play in that?” We put our ideas in my wiki, created a few pages open to the public and started sending out invitations….and then we went on an extended holiday.

Beforehand we hardly discussed what format we wanted for the day. Of course we imagined what we could do if a hundred people showed up, but going to Canada for more than 4 weeks was enough distraction of imagining too much. Though having this connected holiday made it much easier to keep track of responses and reactions. For instance, we made reservations for the conference location while staying in Vancouver.

Two weeks before the big event, we started planning for real. Sending out reminders to those who initially expressed they’d like to come, but hadn’t confirmed. We discussed what kind of format we wanted during the conference day. The number of people that signed up was round about 20, so we could make it a ‘open space’-like workshop (or as we like to call it: unconference).

We tried to get the group discussion going in the week before the workshop, but failed miserably. We both were dealing with severe jet-lag and struggling getting into a daily working rythm again, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown, Ton’s clients were all awakening from their summer slumber mode. We talked about involving those who weren’t able to attend, but we didn’t find the time to plan it. In the end Maarten came to the rescue and streamed the whole day (but I doubt that many followed the stream )

Thursday night the first guests arrived. We had a pre-unconference dinner with Bev, Rory, Oliver, the two of us and later on Lilia, Robert and Alexander joined for desserts. The other guests came to meet us on friday morning at the venue and we had lift off.

A full day of wonderful conversations and insights on all kind of aspects of life. I think we had the perfect number in the room for the kind of workshop we had. I will write about the content of the unconference later on. At the end of the day I caught everyone on tape stating their take away from the day. Still busy editing it, but it will be a lovely collage. We ended the conference day with an Asian take-away dinner at our house.

The next day Ton and I got up early, not yet fully recovered from the day before, to start preparing for the real party. Getting the meat from the butcher in Nordhorn, marinating all the meat, baking cup cakes. All the hard work was rewarded when the guests started coming in during the afternoon and enjoyed themselves, having lots of food (although we provided for a very good meal for some students the next day, and our own freezer is stuffed as well ) and drinks.

I loved the mix of languages, people talking Dutch, German and English.
I loved showing the people from my fencing club a little bit of what my life looks like.
I loved the way new connections were made during those two days.
I loved celebrating my birthday. A feeling I hadn’t experienced since childhood.

A big hug to all those who were there and made these days a wonderful experience.

The biggest hug and lots of love are for Ton, since he was the one making it happen. Without him, it would never have taken place. THANK YOU!