Bell and King (2010) explored conferences as spaces where newcomers to a community can demonstrate their proficiency as members of that community. To improve conferences, they suggest—among other things—to ‘explore other ways of conferencing, like “unconferncing” (Wolf and Troxler 2008)’.
The paper they reference is of course explaining the fundamentals of unbla and is still available from Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9(2), at http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0802614
Reference: Bell, Emma, and Daniel King (2010). The elephant in the room: Critical management studies conferences as a site of body pedagogics. Management Learning, 1–14. Online at: http://mlq.sagepub.com/content/early/2010/03/23/1350507609348851