Oddbean

Thank you, @rabble , for the insights into your #Nostrasia experience. Turning passive listeners into active participants at unconferences may be an answer to shaping more interesting in-depth discussions, helping bridge cultural gaps, and some #unmarketing consumer research. Many builders in the nostr community choose to protect people by not gathering data, nor selling it off to advertisers. This shapes a caring community working on improving their products for the people who use them, instead of for advertisers. We are likely to see many benefits to that choice, including a focus on building creative tools empowering the individual. Not gathering data creates a need to think of alternative avenues on what can improve our experience of nostr products and services, what is drawing people in, and what keeps us in nostr. #Nostr may exist in cyberspace, and many people offer product and service improvement ideas and suggestions within nostr... but when we get to share both space and time, like in conferences, there is no telling what idea may sprout from bringing people who care about similar principles and open protocols. If we can go a step further, not only bringing people together, but bringing them together as active participants, not just silent listeners, the overall conference experience is likely to be much more engaging and enriching. As nostr breaks away from the traditional ways of platforms and their traditional marketing channels, why shouldn't conferences too? Open Space methodologies and Aspiration Tech guidelines have many practical ideas and examples. They help blur the lines between the traditional "speaker" and "listener" roles, creating interactive atmospheres to learn from one another. For example, ahead of the event, participants work on shaping a specific, yet flexible list of topics. This looks similar to what @ROCKSTAR will be guiding, ahead of the next nostr.world unconference, through GitHub projects. You will be able to suggest topics in the open. Then, at the start of a conference, participants gather in small groups, for a few minutes, to each jot down questions on their topics of interest (in post-its). Each question is read out loud and gets assigned a time slot in its specific session at the conference. If too many questions are received, similar ones can be grouped and questions can be prioritized. As a leader in your topic area, you get to learn what people care about, their pain points, their ideas and suggestions... and share your knowledge with them in unconference-style sessions. Having these kinds of "unconference-style" sessions is something that may seem new and not everyone may want to adopt. But, for everyone who wants to try, could we have labels for "conference-style" and "unconference-style” in the GitHub projects area, once it is ready, so speakers can choose whether they want to try something different? @ROCKSTAR