I’m in my 4th year in Austin, one of the things that continues to surprise me, is how I’m continually discovering new places and things. I find myself today at the Spider House at Fruth st. Never heard of it, but another really cool Austin coffee shop and location.

I’m up here for Ops Camp Austin. What? One of the other new cool things thats happening in the tech industry, and in which Austin is also a major driver, an “un-conference”.

Unlike the big commercial conferences that spend a fortune on big locations, put on endless sessions in parallel, all indiscernible from each other and attendees suffer through death by powerpoint multiple times a day. They also tend to be expensive to attend, the hotels are expensive etc.

So an un-conference is the opposite. It costs nothing to attend, it’s informal, there is no pre-set agenda, talks get posted to an informal grid, they are limited in time and thus powerpoint charts, and theres both an air of excitement and anticipation, we don’t know what we are going to do but it’s a big turnout from a lot of new and established Austin Tech companies.