Hold an event

Anyone can hold a Digital Britain Unconference or associate a pre-existing event with Digital Britain Unconference.

The event or unconference can be of any size and held in any suitable place that you can hear yourselves speak: from a few people gathering in a quiet pub to 100+ people meeting in a conference room. The only criteria are:

• Your findings need to be summarised into a short document (see below)
• It needs to happen before 13th May 2009

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Here’s some recommendations for setting an event up:

• Firstly, check: is there already an existing event that you or others could attend?
• If not, find a venue, ideally that’s free, to meet
• Set a date and time (a minimum of about an hour should be set aside for conversation)
• Think about refreshments – can you find someone to provide some, will you need to ask attendees to bring some money with them for drinks?
• Use eventbrite to set up and handle invites and attendees. It also will gives you a page to link to for telling others.
• Tip: limit the numbers who can attend on eventbrite to about 10 or 15 % more than the venue can hold as you will always have people dropping out at the last minute.
• Tell people about the event and send them the eventbrite link – try to make sure you have a wide representation of people invited. Consider: might your mum, best friend, colleague, or neighbour be interested in coming along?
• Encourage attendees to read the Digital Britain Interim Report and other documents, blogs, wikis that have been written to date (see our list of links on the right hand side)
• Add your event to the list here by adding it in the comments section

How to run your event on the day?

• Check out this explanation of unconferences.
• There is no right or wrong way to run an unconference (minus having people on a stage talking and having an audience)
• You are aiming to facilitate conversation amongst people and get ideas going.
• Before hand think about a loose structure to focus conversation. Suggestions: select a set of themes or select a few of the Interim Report articles to focus on or think about the kinds of expertise of those attending.
• Think about how you might break the times of conversation up into sections if your event is going to be longer than an hour
• Designate someone to direct operations and get everyone talking

What is most important is that the conversations are recorded, summarised and sent in to us!

• Post-it notes can be a really handy way to collect ideas, stick them on a wall and photograph them, and use them to help you write your summary.
• Flip-charts and lots of paper and markers can also work well
• Any photos, blog posts, slideshare presentations, Tweets etc, etc should be tagged with one/both of the following: dbuc09, digitalbritainunconference

Send your concise event report (ideally a Word Document no more than 2 sides of A4) by 13th May to: digitalbritainunconferences at gmail dot com

There it will be added to all the other reports we receive and edited into one document and submitted to BERR and this website.

Have fun!