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An unconference inside a conference? Yes, it sounds oxymoronic, but at the single best gathering of communications pros worldwide, why not?

Last year's IABC world conference was my first. Thanks to Debbie Moore, I had the chance to speak on a panel about using internal social media. During the conference, I met a ton of great people, but I found we had little time outside the conference schedule to meetup and chat spontaneously. I suggested we tweetup, but we ran out of time.

With that experience in mind, a small group of us--Mitch Popilchak, Linda Johannesson, Christopher Swan, Bryan Person, and me--decided to submit the unconference as a conference session for the 2010 conference. We were accepted, and we're rolling with it!

Some have suggested that if it's not free or very cheap, it's not an unconference. Unless you're meeting in a city park, it's going to be tough to make any kind of organized event free.

But that's beyond the point here. The IABC conference is already well-established and well-attended. They're expecting over 1,400 attendees. While we're all together, why not have an open space discussion? It'll only make the entire experience that much more valuable.

What do you think? Unpure? Should we have named it differently, maybe the "open space session" to not suggest it's an entire event on its own?