This past weekend I attended ProductCamp Austin #6 (PCA#6). How do you describe ProductCamp Austin? Imagine a TEDxLocal for Product Leaders in an Unconference format and open to all – with the spirit of learning and sharing, and no celebrity fuzz around presenters. Presenters are not billionaire philanthropists or brain scientists, but men and women just like you and me, changing the world in small steps everyday.
I bet ProductCamp is going to do for professionally-managed and paid product conferences what open source technology has done for proprietary software. Or, to put it more plainly, ProductCamp is going to make traditional conferences both irrelevant and unnecessary.
Why events like ProductCamp will disrupt traditional conferences?
For those of you unfamiliar with the term “unconference”, let’s inspect nature of an unconference and of its traditional counterpart:
First, unconferences ensure that featured sessions serve a previously unmet need of the audience. While conferences provide a strict line-up of sessions to attend, unconferences allow attendees to vote democratically on the sessions they find intriguing. How often have you had to pay over a $1,000 to attend a conference that served little value to anyone but the presenter?
Unconferences like ProductCamp are comprised of voluntary peers. How often do you get an opportunity to attend a conference where both the participant and presenter pool are all from your peer group? Well, at ProductCamp, all participants share the common goal of learning from each other.
Whereas traditional conferences might be limited to whoever can pay the hefty conference fee, unconferences like ProductCamp have a more ‘open source’ atmosphere. Access and entry is open to anyone interested in the idea, and the best ideas are selected for presentation. At the end of the day, all content is free to share – ideas, presentations, lectures, videos – just like source code is available to everyone in the open source way.
Compare the above with an industry conference of a leading software vendor or a media company: First you pay a few thousand dollars just to get a ‘pass’, and then you sit through a number of (often boring) presentations, wondering at the end of the day what you really gained besides frequent flyer miles or hotel points.
3 Reasons Why ProductCamp is an awesome experience
If you haven’t yet had the fun of attending a ProductCamp event, you’re missing out. ProductCamp Austin, in particular, offers an incredible experience:
1) Networking among 450 product professionals
2) Learning and sharing ideas with product leaders – 35 sessions to choose from in a single day
3) Free entry pass and a free lunch (who says there’s no free lunch? Well, it is not really free, the sponsors pay; but strictly no pitching in sessions)
During the initial phases of enterprise adoption of open source software there were a lot of skeptics. But look at the widespread adoption now. The same thing could happen to industry conferences. Imagine if Oracle or IBM or Microsoft announced their next conference is going to be an unconference a la ProductCampx’local’.
Winners of best session prizes at PCA #6
Below are the links to the presentations of 1st place winner Kirsten Knipp and runner-up Paul Young. Both presentations were fantastic. The fact that Kirsten won by a margin of 1 vote speaks of the competition and quality. Here are links to their presentations: Marketing the Agile Way & The Product Management X Factor.
Below are my iPhone video interviews with them (at the time of recording they didn’t know they were going to be winners):
Questions/comments? Ping me on Twitter @PGopalan or email me.