Many thanks to everyone who participated and extra thanks to all the great sponsors who made it all possible!

1. Find a team
2. Find a theme
3. Live the dream (of being a video star)

So tomorrow at 5PM, coinciding with the start of the  Bubble Free Pub Crawl (some free beer here to kick it off), participants will be presenting their sketches.  The winning team, as judged by the audience, will receive a $250 cash prize. So let the creative comedy begin!

Please note that these are the Main Talk Topics that will be featured in the Main Room. You can still propose a topic at the event and/or talk with Sponsors in the demo room as we explained in detail in the Web 2point2: Format Update.

Thursday November 9, 2006 @ 1 Market Street, San Francisco, CA

9:00AM Registration begins

10:00AM Introductions, Tech and Flow (Kristie Wells)

10:15AM Why are we here? The Importance of Social Media and Crossing the Web 2.0 Chasm. (Chris Heuer)

10:30AM 12 Five Minute Meetings - the favorite element in our BrainJams, this speed dating styled networking and knowledge exchange is a great way to get in the spirit of the unconference and conversations.

12:00PM Determine discussions in Open Space room.

12:15PM Lunch

1:15PM Just a few words about Social Media Club. This is a special announcement, skip it if you would like, but join us if the force is with you. (Chris Heuer & Howard Greenstein)

Open Space for the afternoon

1:30PM The Economy of Abundance. This post from David Hornik about some new thoughts from Long Tail author Chris Anderson is right in line with something we have been talking about for years. While I have been talking about this in terms of the knowledge economy, he is on track with regards to the impact and disruption it creates. (Hopefully Kevin Jones will of GoodCap will be leading this discussion)

2:15PM Break

2:30PM Real Marketing in a Web 2.0 World This is going to be a real, honest look at the good side of marketing - the kind where the core idea is to match the value of the product or service with the needs of real customers - this is not the smarmy sales at all costs sort of marketing that some unenlightened few would have you believe it is. The Blog post MJ wote is a must read for everyone - according to her post, she is planning to “flesh out my [MJ’s] ideas, experiences, and true-to-life real strategies and plans that absolutely work, produce results, and are (crazy talk) measurable. (Min Jung Kim)

3:15PM Break3:30PM Surprise!

4:00PM Break

4:15PM Tags and Tag Beacons. This session will be lead by Greg Narain, Brian Sollis and Pete Fasano)

5:00PM My Favorite Tools. This is a round robin discussion centered around Participants sharing their favorite tools and demonstrating the one things that makes it so cool.

6:00PM Daily Wrap - Head to Dinner Independently - Light Snacks at the Release Party

7:30PM Web 2.2 Release Party @ Fluid. Unconference attendees get free admission, others who buy tickets now get in for $15 each or $20 at the door. We will have free wine and beer early in the evening (still seeing how far we can stretch the sponsor dollars) and are expecting quite a few people to join us for making the upgrade.

So I am going to do my best to organize an agenda based on what you have expressed an interested in discussing, with some additions based on recent conversations. Some are straight from the proposals, some are based on proposals with an additional suggestion and a few are from verbal suggestions I received while traveling. Most have discussion leaders, but there are some opportunities for people to jump in and lead. You may also propose other talk topics as Lawrence did on widgets that people can discuss in the Open Space room.

Mind you, I did not want to do it this way, but with limited participation to this point in submitting proposals to the agenda there was little other choice other than switching to completely Open Space, which is not what we want to for this particular unconference - especially since some people did take the effort to propose talk topics. We felt that this is the appropriate time for an organizer to step in to ensure quality conversations about what is important to the most people in attendance. It is important to note that everyone who proposed a topic by the deadline will be leading a discussion.

That said, we will have an “Open Space” room and make time available before lunch on Thursday for people to propose alternate conversations against the main room time slots. For those of you who don’t know, Open Space refers to an event format where the individual’s work out the agenda together and then host small group conversations (or large) - it is the format that most of the Camps often use. If you are interested in proposing a Talk Topic for Friday in the Open Space room, you will need to be present by 930am on Friday when we will open up that agenda to be discussed and decided. If you want to propose a talk topic for Thursday aftenroon, you need to be in the room before noon that day.

We will also have a room for sponsors to offer demos and host discussions around their products and services. Most of the companies supporting the event know enough to not pepper you with sales pitches (tell me if they do and we will take care of it). We have done our best to encourage them to not get all ’salesy’ but instead to use the opportunity to organize a “how to get the most from their product or service” session. Or perhaps to just host a round table talking about their type of products - like MobiTV talking with people about what people want from their mobile entertainment experience.

We are taking this approach because we believe that companies who invest in the community have a right to participate in a very transparent way, within the community’s activities and with their authentic, human voices. They want to be involved in conversations with their existing users and with others who are interested in their products or services, so why not give them a clearly labeled space in which they can host conversations separate of the main talk topics. The sessions in this room are being made available to sponsors on a first come first serve basis based on the level of sponsorship. If there are sessions available as of Thursday morning in this room that have not been secured by sponsors, we will make those time slots available for Open Space conversations.

If you don’t want to see what the sponsors are offering or talking about, you never even need to go into the room - if it is more interesting for you than the main discussion or the Open Space one, please join them. The only thing remotely like a pitch you will hear in the sacrosanct space of the main room is 15 minutes about Social Media Club after lunch on Thursday - and you can skip that too if you want to, but we are very excited about the news we want to share with you and we think you will be too.

There are also a couple of surprises we are hoping to spring, but these are still up in the air - good thing we have a few backup plans for those time slots…

We also did not receive as many proposed talk topics as we thought we would and only one person expressed real interest in doing the How To room (thank you for trying Sarah). At this time we are going to pull the formal “how to” room from the agenda due to the limited interest and the amount of extra work that it would involve.  It would seem that we never reached the people interested in learning more about the how to sort of topics unfortunately.
So now, we need your help to ensure we all have a great time this week while learning from each other. I will be posting more on the talk topics later today, so it is not too late to be included if you have something you want to talk about at the unconference - but you must add your voice now. Given the level of participation this far, we did not put the topics to a vote - instead I will learn from the experience of Dave Winer and Bloggercon and put together the best schedule possible for the main room.

At this time, we would ask you to personally invite at least one other person you know who has an interest in helping Web 2.0 cross the chasm into the mainstream of society. You can use this banner on your blog or even create your own, but what we really need is for you to invite someone who can add value to the conversation personally. If someone has some real financial hardship, some of our sponsors like Personal Bee have offered up some of their passes to the community.

We also really need your help volunteering, particularly with setup and cleanup. We will be having a volunteer meeting on Wednesday night, November 8, 2006 at 6:00pm in front of Microsoft’s offices down at 1 Market Street. We need you to be there on time as we need to get a security escort into the building. If you need more details, please see the listing on Upcoming. In addition to general logistical support during the event, we need podcasters, vloggers, some help with food, registration desk support and time checkers to keep things running on time.

As I have previously mentioned in this post on adhocnium, I think we have taken on a humongous challenge in trying to bring the best of the ad-hoc world together with some light structure of traditionally organized events without being dictatorial in our approach. While I did not imagine it would be this hard, we are not going to give up. We believe that the real solution is somewhere between chaos and order - not completely within an adhoc chaotic world and not completely within an overly structured, power centric hierarchy. We believe that we can find the right balance together and widen the understanding of this approach through our collective experience. This is an underlying theme that we will be adding to the agenda of talk topics.

So please help join the conversation and join us on Thursday and Friday so we can make it happen together. You can register here if you have not already done so.