Barcamp-Paper auf der i-KNOW 2013

Das Team des Wissensmanagement Forum Graz hat ihm Rahmen des Engagements am Grazer Barcamp 2013 das Prinzip von Unkonferenzen genauer unter Augenschein genommen. Dabei wurde die Motivation zur Teilnahme an einer solchen Konferenz und die Rolle von sozialen Medien in einer empirischen Untersuchung erörtert. Auch die Nähe des Barcamps zu Communities of Practice wurde untersucht. Das Ergebnis ist die Publikation Assessing Barcamps: Incentives for Participation in Ad-Hoc Conferences and the Role of Social Media, die Anfang September auf der i-KNOW 2013 in Graz internationalen Teilnehmern aus Wissenschaft und Wirtschaft präsentiert wird. Die Publikation profitierte dabei von der Interdisziplinarität des Wissenmanagement Forum Graz und den spezifischen Skills aller Mitautoren. Die Publikation im Detail:

Dennerlein, S., Gutounig, R., Kraker, P., Kaiser, R., Rauter, R., & Ausserhofer, J. (2013). Assessing Barcamps: Incentives for Participation in Ad-Hoc Conferences and the Role of Social Media. To appear in Proceedings of i-KNOW 2013, the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, Graz. Barcamps are conferences without predefined content, often referred to as ad-hoc conferences or unconferences. Therefore, the outcomes of a barcamp are largely unknown before the event. This raises the question of participants’ motivations to attend and contribute. To answer this question, we conducted an exploratory empirical study at the Barcamp Graz 2012. We applied a mixed-method approach: first we used a sociodemographic questionnaire (n=99) which allowed us to characterize the ’typical barcamper’. Second, we conducted qualitative interviews (n=10) to get a deeper understanding of the participants’ motivations to attend, ex- pectations and the use of social media in that context. We identified three concepts, which could be deducted from the interviews: people, format and topics. We found that the motivation to attend and even a common identity is quite strongly based on these three factors. Furthermore, the results indicate that participants share a set of activities and methods by following the barcamp’s inherent rules and make extensive use of social media.