How unconferences make networking the agenda

I have stood at the back of a lot of conferences watching organisers wonder why the networking is flat. The agenda was tight, the speakers were good, the coffee was hot, and most attendees still ended the day with the same two business cards they arrived with.

The flaw is structural. A normal conference treats networking as a residue - whatever people manage to do around the edges of an agenda the organisers wrote for them. The unconference format treats it as the agenda.

My take: unconferences are one of the most effective conference session formats ever invented for a room of adults, and they are wildly under-used outside the tech and learning communities that have used them for twenty years. This piece is the case for using one - or, more practically, for stealing a 90-minute block of one and bolting it onto the event you already run.

What an unconference actually is

An unconference is an event where the people in the room set the agenda. Organisers provide the venue, the rough start and end times, the rooms, and a marketplace structure. They do not provide the content.

The day usually opens with a circle. Anyone who wants to host a session steps in, announces their topic in one sentence, and writes it on a card. The cards go onto a marketplace board against a grid of times and rooms. Everyone walks the board, signs up, and the schedule for the rest of the day is set in about thirty minutes. Sessions are short - typically 45 to 60 minutes - and follow what Open Space Technology calls the Law of Two Feet: if you are not learning or contributing, walk to a session where you are (OpenSpaceWorld, 2024).

Open Space Technology was developed by Harrison Owen in the mid-1980s after he noticed the most useful conversations at the conferences he organised were happening in the coffee breaks. He designed a format that was nothing but coffee breaks, with structure. BarCamp followed in 2005 and Lean Coffee in 2009. The lineage matters because all three are road-tested in adult professional settings, not novelty conference hacks.

Three formats that work for grown-up audiences

There are dozens of unconference variants. These three have the longest track record.

Open Space Technology

The classic. Best for groups of 60 to 300, ideally with a clear theme - a strategic question the community is genuinely trying to work out. The opening circle and the marketplace are non-negotiable; everything else is optional. Open Space surfaces the questions people are actually working on, not the ones they think they should be working on, which is why it produces unusually candid conversations and fast relationship formation.

Lean Coffee

The boardroom-friendly variant. A single table of 4 to 12 people writes topic ideas on sticky notes, dot-votes favourites, and works through them with a five-minute timer. When the timer goes, the table votes - keep going or move on. Lean Coffee is the easiest format to drop into a traditional event because a single 60-minute block does not require rebuilding the day. It pairs well with conference roundtable formats - same physical setup, different permission structure.

Self-organised tracks (BarCamp-style)

Best for technical or domain-deep audiences of 100 to 500. The day has named tracks - usually 4 to 6 - and attendees nominate, vote on and host sessions inside each track. BarCamp-style tracks work well when your community has clear sub-domains (engineering, design, product, ops) and the cross-track movement during sessions is part of the value.

Why the agenda creation is the networking

The reason these formats produce such strong networking is mechanical, not magical.

At a normal event, two things stop people from connecting. They don't know who else cares about the same thing they came for. And even if they do, they don't have a legitimate reason to interrupt a stranger. The marketplace solves both at once. When you write your topic on a card, you are publicly declaring what you are working on. When five other people sign up for it, you have just been introduced to the five people in the room most likely to be useful to you. The conversation is already permitted by the format.

Freeman's 2025 Networking Trends Report found that 60% of event teams do not actively manage networking at all - it sits in parallel with the agenda rather than inside it (Freeman, 2025). Unconferences invert that. There is nothing to manage in parallel because there is no parallel.

Harvard Business Review summarised research showing pandemic-era working patterns reduced people's working ties by an average of 17%, with weak ties - the bridging connections that produce most career opportunities - disproportionately lost (Harvard Business Review, 2023). Unconferences are unusually effective at producing weak ties: the format throws you into a room with people you would never have sought out, around a topic you both actually care about.

When unconferences are the wrong call

The format is not universal. There are three audiences I would not run one for.

Very large first-time audiences. If most of the room is attending for the first time, the marketplace produces thin gruel. People nominate topics they think they should care about rather than the ones they actually do. First-time-heavy events need more scaffolding, not less - that is the territory of inclusive networking ideas and structured icebreakers, not Open Space.

Senior corporate audiences expecting polish. If your audience came because the chief executive is keynoting, they are not in the mood to host a session. The format reads as informal in that setting and risks devaluing the ticket. Run a structured day and replace one block with Lean Coffee instead.

Rooms below about 30 people. The marketplace needs critical mass to produce variety. Below 30, you get four sessions, two of which collapse into the same room. At that size you are better off running a single facilitated discussion or a set of structured b2b networking session formats.

I would also pause before running an unconference where the smartest people in the room are all on the speaker line-up. The format only works when the smartest people are in the audience, willing to host a session about what they are actually working on.

How to bolt one onto a normal event

The lowest-risk way to use the format is to steal a 60 to 90 minute block from a traditional agenda and run an unconference inside it. The block I would pick, every time, is the post-lunch slot. Energy is at its lowest, attention to the main stage drops sharply, and people are already roaming. A marketplace at that point absorbs the energy that was leaking anyway.

Practical sequence for a 90-minute Open Space block inside a traditional day:

1. Set up the wall before lunch. A grid of three 25-minute slots and four rooms or numbered tables. A pile of A5 cards and marker pens. Do this in plain sight so attendees walk past it on the way to lunch.
2. Open with a five-minute brief. Anyone can host. Topics should be specific ("how do we get the ops team out of always-on incidents", not "the future of operations"). The Law of Two Feet applies. There are no observers.
3. Run the marketplace for ten minutes. Hosts write a card, announce the topic in one sentence, place it on the wall. Attendees walk the wall and write their initials on the cards they want to attend.
4. Run three 25-minute sessions. Use a chime to mark changes. Hosts capture three lines: discussed, agreed, follow up.
5. Close with a five-minute harvest. Each host shares one line - what surprised them, what people agreed on, what they want to do next. The harvest is a public commitment moment and produces an unusually strong finish to the afternoon.

For a more ambitious test, run the unconference block on day two of a multi-day event, once attendees know each other. The marketplace will be richer, and the contrast with day one usually generates the strongest conference attendee engagement strategy feedback you are likely to get. If you want a starting point on whether your current event has the slack to absorb a block like this, our free networking gap calculator walks you through the numbers in about two minutes.

The bigger shift is to stop treating the agenda and the networking as two separate things. McKinsey's 2023 State of Organizations research found the highest-performing teams now prioritise self-organisation and connection over rigid hierarchy (McKinsey, 2023). The same shift is overdue at the conferences those teams attend. The unconference is the cleanest expression of it: trust the people in the room to know what they need to talk about, and your job becomes making that talk easy. That trust, more than the marketplace board or the Law of Two Feet, is what produces the networking. The format is just the permission slip.