Phew! We did it! CopyCamp!
It went really well. We had something like 125 people there over the course of the event. It was two and a half days and it was intense, and fun, and well-received, and, I hope, really useful for the people who were there.
I'm putting some notes up here, so others can learn from what we've done.
Some Links:
The CopyCamp site: www.CopyCamp.ca
The CopyCamp wiki: http://wiki.CopyCamp.ca/
Article in Toronto’s Now Weekly (focuses on the event as an unconference):
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2006-10-05/news_story.php
Article in Toronto’s Eye Weekly (focuses on the Copyright issues addressed at the event):
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_09.28.06/features/feature_2.php
Was it a Camp? Was it an unconference?
There was some question about whether CopyCamp was a *camp or an unconference. I’m honestly not sure (and not sure it matters). It was definitely pretty different from the usual Bar Camp model. It was a mash-up of a bunch of ideas, some taken from Bar Camp, some from Open Space, some from the more planned approach taken by Aspiration Tech, and a few ideas of our own.
I’m posting some details here, hoping they’ll be helpful for other people who want to adapt or mutate the *camp model for other purposes.
Some Differences between CopyCamp and (most) Bar Camps
Not primarily for tech people
Most of the people at CopyCamp weren’t particularly engaged in the technology world. While there were lots of tech-friendly people there, it was by no means a tech event. Lots of participants, for instance, weren’t comfortable using the wiki.
Put together by a pre-existing organization, not an ad-hoc group
Unlike most Bar Camps, which are put on informally by ad hoc groups, CopyCamp was presented by the Creators Rights Alliance, an umbrella group for various Canadian organizations involved in managing authors’ rights. The CRA hired people (including me) to put this event together. We were paid to work on it (again, unlike most Bar Camps), and we had some funding from arts councils.
The CRA had organizational goals, requirements, and politics that were probably pretty different than most Bar Camps. The needs and interests of numerous member organizations had to be considered. At times it was challenging getting a group like this to go along with an unconference model- there were lots of doubts and scares along the way, and occasional objections that the model wouldn’t work in this context.
Unusual pricing/Admissions structure
CopyCamp got a lot of attention early on for our pricing policy. We were trying to attract a pretty diverse bunch of people: We wanted to get lots of artists to come to the event. We also suspected the event would be attractive to lawyers and bureaucrats. An early plan was to make event really cheap, to make it affordable to artists. But there was a concern that it would then be overrun by lawyers and bureaucrats, whose presence we wanted to keep under control.
The answer we came up with was to charge a pretty high admission fee ($700) and then provide subsidized (ie: free) spaces for artists and others we really wanted there. The subsidies also included travel expenses and accommodation for a lot of artists from around the country. Some of the money for these subsidies came from the admission fees, some came from other funding sources. We also paid honoraria to a few people to come participate – some of those people gave formal talks, some were just people who we really wanted to participate in the conversations.
In the end – this strategy has some real upsides and some real downsides. The upside was that really succeeded in getting a diverse group of people. I think if we'd just opened it up and assigned spots first-come first-served, we wouldn't have had as good of a mix as we did. We were also able to fund an interesting mix of people from out of town - notable participants like Mark Hosler from Negativland, as well as young artists from more out-of-the-way places who otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to attend.
There were some downsides, too, to this way of doing things. A lot of people who might have gotten in for free were likely scared away by the high face value on admission. And I’m sure we turned away a lot of people who would have been great participants. Going through applications individually turned out to be *incredibly* demanding - we spent huge amounts of time, energy, and hair-pulling deciding who to offer subsidies and travel grants to.
A bit more structured than your average Bar Camp
CopyCamp was a little more planned than a regular Bar Camp, I think, though probably a little less planned, say, than the sorts of unconferences put on by Aspiration Tech. For around 2/3 of the conference, people were mostly involved in Bar-camp-style small participant led sessions. But we also had some structured participatory activities (Speed Geek and a sort of World Café discussion exercise), an art-gallery style Salon displaying work, and a couple of more traditional panel-style discussions.
Not for a community w. natural affinity for *camp
Partly, they were not a community with a natural affinity for the unconference idea. Most Bar Camps are targeted to communities who are really used to models of emergence and self-organization (Any who's into Open Source or Wikis isn’t going to find the idea self-organizing conference of participants *too* mind-blowingly unfamiliar), and then self-select within those communities who are most into the idea. At CopyCamp, there were a lot of people involved who were pretty put off by the unconference idea. For a lot of people used to more conventional organization structures, it was quite a stretch to believe that something like this could would.
Not a community w. natural affinity for each other
Ultimately, I think the biggest difference between CopyCamp and a typical *camp is this:
A regular Bar Camp, it seems to me, is about creating a community where one wants to exist: Finding a hundred people who, if they only met, would get along great, and making it easy for them to meet each other. CopyCamp was partly about that. But even more, it was about creating conversation among people who are naturally not so inclined to talk to each other. This created a different set of challenges.
We worked very hard to get a very diverse group of people there, with different experiences and divergent opinions. Everyone recognized the importance of cross-pollination between these groups, but these are not people who are drawn to talk to each other. At the opening night, you could see them all divided into clusters – the young artists in one corner, the old artists in another, the computer people clustered together, and so on, into around a half-dozen distinct social categories. We had to work hard, and use structured activities to get people talking outside of their comfortable clusters.
What we did
Here are some things we did to structure the event:
Stickers
At the very start of the event, we gave out stickers listing a bunch of different categories, to let people self-identify (or lie) by sticking icons onto their badges.
Opening/Closing Circles:
We had big circles at the start and end of each of the two days. These were where we provided event-wide information, let people present session ideas, and short bits of big-picture conversation
World Café Conversation:
Right after the opening circle on the first morning, we organized people into a sort of "World Café" conversation. I use the quotes because I'm not sure if we did it by the proper world café rules. But it worked pretty great. The goals were to get people to meet a bunch of new randomly selected folks (as opposed to self-selection into affinity groups), to talk concretely about their own work (I was worried that the online conversations preceding the event were fast become too abstract) and to encounter a lot of different ideas and opinions.
The basic mechanics were: We divided people randomly into groups of 5 and we gave them a question to discuss. Then we re-randomized, and gave them a new question.
The questions in order were:
- How does your art get paid for? Where does the money actually come from for the work you do. Trace it back. For people at the event who aren't artists – how does your work get paid for.
- Why does your art merit being paid for? In a well-functioning society, why is this work worth paying for? Or is it. (I've had jobs where I've thought in a better society, we'd pay money to prevent the work I was doing)
- What is art for? What function does art serve, broadly, in society, that makes it worth paying for?
We gave people 15 minutes or so on each question. By the end of 45 minutes, everyone had met a dozen other people at the event, and had a pretty serious conversation, in which they learned about what sort of work those people do, and their beliefs.
Self-organized Sessions
Pretty standard Bar Camp / Open-Space model. We put up a grid and let people add sessions. You could add sessions before the event via the wiki, or announce it at the opening circle, or just post it during the day.
Guidelines
We offered some guidelines, for session conveners and for participants. These were available online, and also on paper at the event itself.
The sessions
There were lots of awesome sessions. On the wiki, there’s a list of sessions that were proposed before the conference, and notes on lots of the sessions.
Speed Geek
We used the Speed Geek model from Aspiration Tech, modified just a bit for out own purposes. We focused more on presentation of ideas than on presentation of technologies. We programmed the Speed Geek event very carefully, with an eye toward presenting people with a really broad range of opinions.
Aspiration notes on Speed Geek
CopyCamp Speed Geek Page: With notes for presenters and audio recordings of presentations.
Salon:
We had a salon (more) of art projects related to the event.
