In 1983, an American consultant named Harrison Owen arranged a conference on leadership on which he worked for a year. The conference went well yet afterwards everyone, including himself, thought the most useful part of the conference were the coffee breaks – here the most interesting conversations emerged.
So he thought, “If I have worked on something for a year, and the best part is the only thing I haven’t prepared – what would a conference look like, where the coffee breaks are the main thing? How would you practically go about organizing such a thing?” What followed was a way of conferencing where preparations were focused on the invitation and the setting, and the content creation left to the participants.
Later, this way of conferencing has sometimes been referred to as “open space conferencing” or “unconferencing”.