Our first unconference!

This month, we held the first ever OrgOrg Unconference. It was a little bit inspiration, a little bit insanity, and a lot bit completely awesome. Thanks to the intrepid 30 organization organizers who were game enough to show up and give it their all! Thanks to our event sponsor Lyft, who was totally non-invasive, very friendly, and hooked people up with fuzzy pink mustaches. Thanks also to Kinichi for the crazygood food. And big thanks to Thoughtbot for hosting in their sweet space (s/o to Carlo, who runs the show over there)!

Carlo made us a sweet sign for the front door of their building.

For those unfamiliar, an Unconference is a bit of a mini-conference, where the agenda is not predetermined. Instead, upon arrival the group gathers and writes their ideas on a big whiteboard, or other shared space, and votes on which topics are most interesting to them. The top-voted topics are selected, and the group splits up based on the things they want to discuss. You can hop around from group to group if you don't like the first one you selected - it's all very freeform and flexible. At the end, we chose to reconvene and summarize our learnings for the benefit of the group.

This time around, we covered four basic topics:

1. Career Development: how to make a case for headcount, how to figure out what you really love when you're doing a little of everything, and how to actually make time to think about these conversations with yourself (and with your boss).
2. Dream Tools: our favorite tools and products...and what we wish existed to magically solve all of our software problems for us.
3. Project Management: how to set up systems to organize your myriad tasks, what's the most useful for large-scale and small-scale project planning, and how to stay organized.
4. Onboarding and Offboarding: how to systemize the process of bringing someone onto your team, how to run that process backwards when someone leaves, what kinds of things to do to make people feel at home 

oh, and we ate a lot of great food, courtesy of Kinichi (http://www.kawashimaskitchen.com)

The discussion was lively, and the group was excited. For many attendees, it was their first OrgOrg event, and the first time they'd gotten to talk shop with people who truly understand what they do for a living. We had newbies and veterans. People from small companies and large companies. Some who can't get enough of office organization, and some who care deeply about employee experience. But everyone there works hard to make the companies they work for great. 

A room full of passionate operations folks? What's not to love?

Dalyte, our Events Team Lead, sorting through the topic suggestions

We certainly didn't get to all of the topics people wanted to discuss, so you better believe we'll be doing this again sometime soon!

Thanks again to everyone who came out and helped make our first Unconference a success. We were a little nervous about how it would all turn out, and because of your enthusiasm and support, we feel like this is definitely something we can do again!

Did you attend? How was your experience? What can we improve next time? What topics would you like to see covered? What did you learn?