Hi Paul

I totally agree on the observations you had during the latest tech conferences. I'm also a big fan of open space (I attended two unconferences this year) and short presentations (lightning talks, pecha kuchas). I really like it when you're able to attend a bunch of short presentations on different topics with different speakers. There are too little speakers out there who are able to deliver a 60 minutes talk that doesn't become boring. I would love to attend such a conference. And as I'm a lightning talk addict I would also be happy to do a short presentation ;)

- marc

I'm skeptical. I mean I agree presentation shouldn't last more than 45 minutes (30 maybe) unless you have a real star on the stage. But I'm not sure if limiting people to 15 minutes is a right way to go. TEDx format is specific - you expect to hear about ideas you no nothing about. It means many of them deals with pretty high-level stuff as otherwise they wouldn't be interesting for the most of the audience.

When you narrow subject range on the conference you see more and more people in the audience being familiar with basic stuff. And more of them want to hear details and advanced stuff. You've definitely heard rants on different conferences: "I've heard nothing new" and alike. Cutting length of presentations would likely end up with more basic short stories.

But there's more. From my perspective, the best thing about presentations are Q&A sessions at the end. Everyone in the room is on the same page, as everyone heard the presentation, and people discuss real-life issues, challenging the presenter at the same time. If you cut slots to 15-20 minutes you automatically cut that out. Of course you may expect to move it to open space afternoon but the momentum is lost.

Also I liked the idea of open space track being held simultaneously with session track(s) all day long. I prefer it over forcing everyone to go to open space at the same time (not everyone wants/likes to use this format).

To summarize I would stop halfway there:
- shorter sessions, but not as short as on TED/TEDx events
- time left for Q&A session after presentations
- all-day long open space, but not as the only option
- possibly a single track to attract more people to open spaces and avoid dilemmas with choosing the presentation

I've been to a conference and a meetup that had a similar format (NYAC and Ignite Kraków) and I think it worked out great.

I don't agree with Paweł that Open Spaces should happen in parallel with presentations. On Ignite Kraków, we had 12 different discussions (3 time slots / 4 tables) in the time span of an hour and a half. How many discussions in open spaces were there on the last, two day long AgileCE? At most five from what I recall, and maybe even less.

Also, I don't think that there should even be an Q/A session after each presentation (well, maybe a short one wouldn't hurt). If you make sure that every presentation gets a slot in the open spaces agenda, and that the speaker is present there, it would be a much better way of asking questions and getting more detailed information on the topic, and you can also have more presentations this way.

One thing that I would change is having a couple of "traditional", improvised lightning talks before open spaces. First of all, lightning talks are often very interesting and/or entertaining, so it would be a shame if they were only limited to open spaces "report" talks. Secondly, by putting them before open spaces, you would provide people with some more (hopefully) interesting topics to talk about.

I have no strong opinion one way or another about whether there should be only one track to the conference. In my experience when there are multiple tracks the audience is smaller, which in turn sometimes allows much more interaction with the presenter during the talk (which is great if what you are shooting for is a really interactive conference). Having some choice isn't a bad thing too. However, more tracks means more presentations, which in turn means allowing presenters and topics that otherwise would not make the cut.

I can share my experience of the Open Vocano conference in London last year which was organised in a spur of a moment and which was one of the best such events I have recently been to.
It was entirely put together with an open-space approach and had hourly sessions. The simple rules we followed were the following:
* Whoever comes are the right people
* Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
* When it starts is the right time
* When it's over, it's over
It wasn't chaotic or manic but engaging and exciting. The aspect I liked most was that it was encouraged that people would join sessions as they saw fit and could come in and out during a talk ("The law of two feet") so you'd quickly move on if the talk wasn't what you had hoped for.

Sorry for late reply...

I agree the 60-90 min presentations are way too long for most of the speakers. Make it 20min will make them focused to the single idea they want to tell...
I like the format Paul suggested 20min talk, 10min Q&A.
If that's possible, I would have lightning talk slot also before openspace. If you do some promotion before the conference, you may have enough people willing to join that and share their experiences. It could help if you suggest some concrete areas (my experience with such event is that until we suggest several areas, there is less people as they believe they have nothing to say... )
I like the interaction with speakers and mostly that's the hard part on traditional conferences. If we can make openspace working, it's great.
The only question is how active will be the audience... if they are willing to join... I had a feeling from last year (and my Prague conference as well), that less people are wiling to talk with foreign speakers... I had quite a lot people talking to me and Czech speakers at Prague, but I haven't noticed the same thing with the foreign speakers there... and the same at ACE last year... even though the talks of foreign speakers were rated much higher then Czech ones... it may be that listening English talk is easier than go and talk in English...

I believe 2 parallel stages are good. I like options :) ... if one seems boring, you have still some place to go... if two are great, too bad, but normally there is one better ;))

One good possibility to start the openspace may be to join a couple of speakers at one session - it worked great at Agileee 2009 .... they make a strong discussing core and the other people can join that....

While on one side I like the idea, on the other I am worried: I have seen and presented at conferences with shorter slots and I've seen there the best and the worst presentations ever. A shorter presentation is IMO significantly more complicated to pack properly as it's difficult to keep the message short and poignant: some speakers can do it and they will shine, but I fear most speakers can't do it and it might end up in a more varied but very boring show.

One conference I've seen was organised in several thematic tracks, each track with short slots, i.e. a similar concepts as you are thinking but with more choice. Apparently, the availability of shorter slots was used by some as an opportunity to get a cheaper conference ticket rather than prepare a remarkable show. The result was an awfully boring track with very few highlights. As the conference went on, more and more people left the tracks and started chatting in the corridors...

Summarizing: if you believe you can have good enough speakers for the job, it might be a great way to go, but if you don't it might fire back!

As per the open space, IMO it would benefit from not having a track in parallel. I've seen several conferences with open space in parallel and, when the open space is a paring zone for who is not interested in the official program it doesn't work with the energy it could.

All the points made above are good, including the concerns expressed by Pierluigi.

I don't think there's such a thing as a "one size fits all" format. The idea of trying the format suggested by Paul intrigues me but I know I will have to adapt my presentation style, strategy and contents to it (which I do with any conference, BTW).

For example, having just 25 minutes max means for me that I will have to bring a few exercises, that I was going to suggest to the audience, outside of the presentation slot, possibly in the open space time or somewhere else.

If some speaker feels that they absolutely need more than 25 minutes, perhaps they could split the talk into a two-parter.

One thing that has not been discussed above is the time between sessions. With such a short presenting time, I think we need at least 10 minutes, to be sure that the speakers can make all the necessary arrangements for the talk and have some slack time in case something doesn't go well (malfunctioning mike, display problems, etc.).

Regarding the open space time, I agree that it's probably not very useful if in parallel with the talks. I also like Zuzi's idea of two speakers teaming up to kickstart an open space discussion.

My experience about timing is:
* 5-20 minutes - OK, as long as you talk about a *single* idea
* 30 minutes - enough for a typical presentation, but without questions
* 45 minutes - perfect for presentation + Q&A
* longer - too long to keep focus.

I definitely agree with Pierluigi, shorter presentations require more skills from the speaker. My personal favorite is half an hour.

Moreover, when Q&A starts I often notice sort of a conflict between people eager to discuss the matter and those who would prefer to leave their seats. Having separate time for discussions would solve this problem.

I like having at least 2 tracks to choose from. However, making a choice between the talks and unconference happening at the same time is terribly hard. Also, it makes the choice unfair cause presentations are in a way more predictable (therefore more popular). That is why open-space in the afternoon/evening sounds like a good idea to me.

-Paweł

20-30 min long presentations (+around 10 min Q&A) sounds like a very good plan. It encourages speaker to choose the most iportant/interesting issues to present. The audience simply does not have time to get bored.

I like the idea of afternoon open space (it's really horrible to choose whether to go to an interesting presentation when you are in the middle of a discussio/war....).
Maybe some pecha-kucha/ignite presentation raising controversial issues in open space could engage people to get involved in passionate discussions?

Last year I attended a Pecha Kucha and a TEDx conference which got me really excited about shortening the standard 1 hour session length.
My attention span doesn't last as long as one full hour. The TEDx format is an excellent format to prevent this. On the other hand, I do like to go in depth on certain topics, which often requires longer sessions. Espescially in a conference with a narrow focus, unlike TEDx where topics are often not closely related to each other.
Your suggestion of providing an open space after the sessions might give the opportunity to explore interesting ideas in depth.
As others mentioned, I have experienced too that an open space in parallel with sessions don't work very well, so I would definitely keep the 2 separated.

I, too, am getting frustrated with the amount of content that is now being offered in video form that should just be text. -sale purses

I'm in favor of longer Q&A period - most of the real benefit comes from these parts.
As people tend to have slow "warm-up" and questions only come puring after 1-2 start raising questions,
I would suggest to allow raising questions on-line during the presentation.
As most people now come with Smartphones, tablets and laptops -
Setting up a web site to collect questions while these still burn in peoples mind - is very useful.
A normal URL + QR codes should be presented in advance.
As some questions raised during the talk may be answered along the talk - I would also consider a question withdrawl option.