Guest post by Liz Fraley
TC Camp, the unconference for content creators, consumers, and the people who support them, is happening at Mission College in Santa Clara on Saturday, 25 January.
I don't know if you've been to an unconference before, but they are very different from regular conferences. They are not juried. Sessions aren't presenter-decided topics. It's much more fluid and much more audience decided. All session topics are decided by the attendees on the day of the event. Everyone nominates topics; we vote on them together; and then, those sessions with enough votes get scheduled into the agenda. You can guarantee there is always a session happening that you're interested in.
Unconferences are all “hallway”—like the hallway conversations you have between session at regular conferences. At an Unconference, you get the chance to work with other people to really wrap your arms around a topic and figure it out as it applies directly to you.
The main unconference (afternoon) is free. We have an expert panel to kick things off, which Scott Abel is moderating. If you're interested, there are morning workshops (before the main unconference starts) that cost a modest $30. There are six morning workshops to choose from that will help get the creative juices flowing:
- Structured Authoring—lessons learned from the pioneers
- Analytics—learn how to apply and interpret analytics to improve your content
- Content Strategy—strategy from the outside (your customer's side)
- Responsive Design—learn how to improve your authoring so your content looks good anywhere
- Content Quality—improve authoring and publishing efficiency and the experience of your users
- Adobe—all about TCS5
It's an amazing experience—energetic, dynamic, and all about the attendees learning from each other.
For more information about this year's event, visit the TC Camp website. If you want to see what someone from the San Francisco chapter had to say about last year, he wrote up a review here for their December newsletter.