Last week the University of Michigan hosted a Michigan Meeting on Microbial Communities, “Unseen Partners: Manipulating Microbial Communities that Support Life on Earth”. The meeting was widely regarded as successful with an engaging debate by Norm Pace and Ford Doolittle, numerous talks, and discussion panels. At the bottom of the agenda was “The Unconference”, organized by Melissa Duhaime, Nina Lin, and myself. During the meeting and since, several people have asked me, “What is this unconference thing?” To which I’d reply, “Uhhh…” ¹

The conference was largely the brain child of Tom Schmidt with the backing of the Rackham Graduate School. From the beginning, the goal of the organizers was to have a different kind of meeting than we normally go to. Being on sabbatical from September until March, I was largely out of the loop on most of the planning. When I returned and came back into the loop it was clear that the planning hadn’t gone ideally - there was an unfortunate skew in the representation of women. There was also a Wednesday morning session that still needed to be filled. With both of these issues in mind, I proposed the unconference format.

I participated in a hackathon in December 2015 at NESCENT. We were working together to develop a curriculum built around reproducible research practices. Throughout the meeting we were hearing each other talk about some really cool technologies and practices. Because they didn’t fit in with the planned schedule, extended discussions and demos weren’t feasible. On the last day, we each took sticky notes and posted them to a white board with ideas for short talks/demos with suggested speakers. Then we voted on which topics we wanted to hear about. In the end we had a session of quick (or “lightning”) talks on the more popular topics. The idea is that this upends the organization of the conference and allows the participants to set the agenda and give talks. A goal of these is to get people from all ranks and background to participate.

At our meeting, Monday morning Melissa opened the idea of the unconference by mentioning that we would be soliciting ideas from people for topics that they’d like to hear more about based on the content of the meeting. Melissa gave two examples. The first was to have a panel discussion on educational issues and the second was a panel discussion on diversity issues highlighting Diversify EEB ². We posted several pieces of paper in the meal room and as a google doc with these examples and invited others to post their suggestions. Over the next two days, we had people use the paper and google doc to vote on what they wanted to hear about along with who they’d like to hear talk. In addition to the ones Melissa introduced, there were suggestions to talk about statistics, microbiome hype, searching for mechanism, the virome, and one or two others. I think the uncertainty of the unconference format led to low voter turn out. Regardless, the winner was education.

Our panel was wonderful and did a great job considering they didn’t really know what was in store for them and really had no time to prepare. They included Mark Martin, Aaron Best, Steven Hecht, Nicole Koropatkin, and Marian Schmidt. There were a couple of other people at the meeting that couldn’t stay for the unconference that also would have been wonderful (like Tanya Noel)³. We were obviously limited in that we couldn’t fly in people on 2 hours notice, but we did a good job of balancing variation in rank, institution, and gender while exploiting the strengths of the meeting’s participants. It turned out that having the panel was great, but (no offense) was somewhat unnecessary. Melissa’s moderation of the event elicited other experts in the room that we didn’t know about.

Melissa first had the 50 or so people in the room go around and introduce themselves. This always makes me nervous because it takes up a lot of time and there’s always someone that feels the need to read their memoir. Regardless, it is a great strategy to putting everyone on the same level and getting people to open up. Fortunately, the room we were in had round tables with 5 or 6 people at each table. Using this layout, we had each table come up with a question that they would like to see discussed. They entered these questions into a google doc that then became the outline of the broader discussion. After 15 minutes, which evolved from creating questions to discussing them as a table, we reassembled and allowed each person in the room to vote for 3 topics. Here were the top vote getters…

• What is the most fruitful way to introduce microbial ecology to non-scientists such as philosophers and the lay public?
• How can we get students to think about answers to questions posed? How to encourage breadth of training?

There were many more questions that came up that we either folded into these questions or weren’t able to get to. We then had the panelists address the first question from their experience and the discussion just happened. Grad students talked, women talked, educators talked, grizzly old professors talked, it went really well. Throughout the discussion Melissa did an amazing job of compiling the comments on the google doc. Because we were projecting the google doc, other people opened up to contributing to the notes as well adding in bullet points, resources, and commentary. We received a lot of positive comments about the format and discussion. The entire session went for about 2 hours before it finally started to stall. I would really encourage anyone interested in teaching microbiology to go check out the google doc.

I suspect that if we did this again, it would go even better because people would have a better sense of what we meant by an unconference. What would I do differently next time? The initial list of suggested panelists from the conference participants was all/mostly men. I could have anticipated this earlier and could have roped Marian, Nicole, and possibly other locals. Related to this, I probably would have used a smaller panel, since the audience really supplied their own expertise making the panel a bit superfluous. In hindsight, it would have been great to collect data about who talked, but I think we got the balance we were looking for. A couple times I asked specific questions directed to women or junior people in the room to draw them out. Of course this could have blown up on me, but I knew them and asking them questions got them to open up and be more engaged. For future implementations, I’d encourage shorter, daily unconferences. The first one would help get people going with the format and then by day three there would be really solid interactions. Of course, a problem with organizing conferences is that everyone wants all the time for their pet thing so even doing one is great.

I don’t know the scale where the format breaks down, but based on my N of 2, I think they are a great mechanism to upending the traditional conference format of never ending talks by the usual suspects. I’d say that if you are looking for something different that will draw in more people, add an unconference to your next meeting. If nothing else see it as an experiment. As scientists, aren’t we supposed to love experiments?