EventCamp and the Power of Participatory Events
How a community-built experiment in the early 2010's quietly shaped a generation of conveners—and revealed where the Gathering Economy was headed
Editor’s Note: This story exists because of the generosity of the EventCamp community, who shared archives, memories, and corrections as the history came back into focus. I am especially grateful to Adrian Segar and Ruud Janssen, whose thinking and design fingerprints shaped the EventCamp model in lasting ways. The participant list is a work in progress; if we missed anyone or you can help refine the record, please reach out at David@GatheringPoint.com.
By the time EventCamp was proposed, much of the social capital that made it possible had already been earned. The community did not form because a venue was booked or an agenda was published. It formed in public, through conversations, disagreements, humor, and shared curiosity that unfolded digitally long before anyone shared physical space. EventCamp did not create that community. It gave it a room.
That distinction matters because it points to something larger than one unconference or one moment in the evolution of the events industry. It suggests that we are living at the front edge of a recurring cycle of gathering, one in which communities form online first and then, almost inevitably, begin searching for a room where relationships can take on weight, consequence, and durability.
In the late 2000s, that community coalesced in the open digital commons of Twitter under the unclaimed hashtag #eventprofs. Planners, technologists, facilitators, association leaders, and agency thinkers found one another there, often before they ever met face to face. What began as the exchange of tips and frustrations evolved into a continuous, public conversation about how gatherings actually worked and how they might work better. Trust accumulated not through titles or credentials, but through presence and generosity of thought. Lara McCulloch, based in Toronto at the time, was one of several quiet catalysts whose steady participation helped normalize the space as a shared home rather than a broadcast channel.
EventCamp also did not emerge in isolation. It was part of a wider cultural moment already underway across technology, media, and education, where dissatisfaction with top-down conferences had given rise to a family of gatherings known collectively as camps. BarCamp, PodCamp, EduCamp, and others rejected polished stages in favor of circles of chairs, replaced keynote authority with situational expertise, and treated conversation as the primary unit of value. These camps were intentionally light on hierarchy and heavy on improvisation, operating more like pop-up learning communities than formal institutions. What united them was not a format so much as an attitude: contribution mattered more than consumption, and participation mattered more than polish.
What made EventCamp distinct was that it turned this lens inward, applying the camp ethos to the events industry itself and asking its practitioners to interrogate their own craft in public.
EventCamp NYC — February 6, 2010
The first EventCamp, held at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City, did not feel like a launch so much as a collective exhale. Roughly seventy people showed up in person, many meeting face to face for the first time after months of online conversation. The day opened with a blank grid rather than a polished program, and the responsibility for filling it belonged to the room. Session ideas were proposed in the moment and clustered around questions rather than names. Conversations formed and dissolved as people moved freely between rooms. If a session stalled, no one felt obliged to stay. If it caught fire, it spilled into hallways, lunch tables, and conversations that refused to be contained by the schedule.
Leadership was provisional and situational. Adrian Segar’s insistence on participant-driven meetings anchored the philosophical center of the day, not as theory but as lived experience. Jeff Hurt and Sam Smith translated those ideas into facilitation practice, while Mike McAllen quietly made the experiment function at all, solving problems as they appeared rather than waiting for permission. Emilie Barta stepped into an unfamiliar role as an early video host, conducting backstage conversations for people who were not physically present and insisting that remote participants be treated as part of the event rather than as spectators.
From the beginning, EventCamp was hybrid by necessity rather than by trend. Livestreams were improvised. Chat tools were clunky. Remote participation required patience rather than polish. The technology often failed, but the ethic was clear. Presence was not binary.
EventCamp East Coast I — November 12–13, 2010 (Philadelphia)
The first EventCamp East Coast marked a significant evolution. It was the first EventCamp to fully adopt Adrian Segar’s Conferences That Work design, with attendance capped to preserve intimacy and psychological safety. Sessions were crowdsourced on site through a structured process that surfaced participants’ needs, experience, and expertise, then translated that collective intelligence into a program built in real time.
This edition made explicit something that had been implicit until then: participation is not just energizing, it is vulnerable. For that reason, sessions were not streamed, recognizing that deep conversation requires trust that is difficult to sustain with an unseen audience.
The session titles themselves reveal what the group was preoccupied with at the time: applied improvisation, participant-driven events, brain-friendly engagement, social media as connective tissue rather than marketing, mobile and web integration, and the physical design of trade shows to encourage interaction. A decade later, what is striking is not how dated these topics feel, but how current they remain. The tools changed. The questions did not.
Andrea Sullivan’s presence proved pivotal. As a brain researcher specializing in brain-compatible learning, she introduced a neuroscience lens that reframed participation as a cognitive and physiological experience rather than a stylistic preference. Arriving without knowing anyone, she left with dozens of meaningful professional relationships, illustrating how quickly participatory design can translate into genuine connection when cognitive and social overload are intentionally reduced. It was no accident that she moved from participant to contributor the following year.
EventCamp National — February 11–13, 2011 (Chicago)
The National Conference in Chicago was the third EventCamp and the first attempt to test whether the ethos could stretch across a longer, more visible gathering. A broader range of voices joined the room, including brand and community leaders, while the hybrid layer became more production-intensive. Some sessions soared. Others struggled.
Chicago revealed an uncomfortable truth that would echo through later editions: the very structures required to scale participation risked undermining the freedom that made it powerful in the first place. It was not a failure, but it was a reckoning.
EventCamp Twin Cities — August 25–26, 2011 (Minneapolis)
When EventCamp reached Minneapolis, the energy shifted from permission to craft. Learning blocks focused on innovation, gamification, mobile technology, and hybrid participation, not as ends in themselves but as enablers of agency. Remote pods gathered in parallel locations, feeding insights back into the main event. EventCamp was no longer a single room. It had become a constellation.
Looking back at the agendas from these years, a pattern emerges. EventCamp participants were consistently wrestling with how to move audiences from passive to active, how to design for attention rather than overload, how to integrate remote voices without diminishing the room, and how to create environments where learning and leadership could emerge organically. Where EventCamp missed, it missed at the level of implementation rather than intention. Specific platforms and apps aged quickly. The human problems being explored proved durable.
Hybrid participation offers the clearest example. Early tools were unreliable and often frustrating. Livestreams dropped. Chat broke. None of it worked smoothly. What did not disappear was the insight behind those experiments. Participants were not trying to replicate the live experience online. They were trying to design for agency across distance, understanding long before the industry had stable platforms that inclusion was a design problem, not a technical one.
EventCamp Europe — September 9, 2011
EventCamp Europe represented a clear maturation of the experiment. It was framed explicitly as an exploration of audience-centric meeting formats, signaling a shift from participation as ethos to participation as design responsibility. Hybrid was approached not as a substitute for presence, but as a way to widen participation without diminishing the value of being together.
Rather than a single gathering with a remote audience attached, Europe functioned as a network of distributed nodes stitched together digitally. Under Ruud Janssen’s influence, facilitation became a discipline, experimentation a method, and hybrid presence an architectural choice. Younger participants such as Miguel Neves encountered EventCamp at its most mature phase, an experience that would later inform how he interpreted the industry as an analyst and editor. Europe transformed EventCamp from an improvisational gathering into a field of practice.
EventCamp Vancouver and EventCamp East Coast II — November 4–6, 2011
The final chapter unfolded on parallel tracks. In Vancouver, under the stewardship of Tahira Endean alongside Judy Kucharuk and Shawna McKinley, participation was treated not as a tactic but as an act of trust. Sustainability moved from rhetoric into shared behavior through the Acts of Green initiative, and organizers concluded by pulling back the curtain on how the event had been designed, making transparency itself a form of participation.
At the same time, the second EventCamp East Coast brought the model into direct contact with institutional power. Associations, nonprofits, and government-adjacent organizations were well represented, and Adrian Segar’s influence became especially pronounced. Participation was no longer framed as an ideal, but as a pragmatic response to complexity, with facilitation functioning as a form of governance rather than performance.
Why It Ended—and Why It Didn’t
What EventCamp never fully solved was the cost of participation when participation is taken seriously. The same people facilitating sessions were often managing livestreams, moderating backchannels, organizing dinners, and holding space late into the night. There was no paid infrastructure, no rotation, and no institutional backstop.
Burnout, however, was only part of the story. Timing was the other. The years in which EventCamp flourished coincided with rapid growth across the events industry itself. Conferences scaled. Agencies expanded. Associations professionalized. The ideas tested inside EventCamp were suddenly in demand outside of it. Facilitation skills practiced in unconference rooms translated into leadership roles. Hybrid experiments improvised with goodwill became mandates.
Seen this way, EventCamp did not fade because it failed to matter. It receded because it mattered enough to change the trajectory of the people who built it. Its energy dispersed into careers, organizations, and institutions that absorbed its lessons in quieter ways.
Revisiting EventCamp now surfaces a nostalgia that feels less sentimental than formative, closer to remembering summer camp than recalling a conference. Not because it was carefree, but because it was immersive, identity-shaping, and emotionally sticky. People remember it not for specific tools or sessions, but for how it felt to belong temporarily to a place where curiosity was rewarded and contribution mattered.
Digital communities continue to form at unprecedented speed. What they seek next is a room. The future of gatherings will not be defined by who has the biggest following or the most polished production, but by who understands how to choreograph the handoff from attention to agency, from digital ignition to embodied trust, from community to room.
EventCamp, imperfect and unfinished, showed us what it looks like when that work begins.
What Was in the Air at EventCamp
Look closely at the EventCamp agendas from those years and a pattern emerges that feels almost uncanny in hindsight. The sessions were not organized around tools or trends so much as around unease. People were questioning the authority of the stage, the passivity of the audience, and the assumption that more information automatically led to better outcomes. There was a shared sense that something about the traditional conference model was no longer aligned with how adults actually learn, decide, and connect.
Again and again, the conversations returned to participation—not as a gimmick, but as a rebalancing of power. Titles like Participant-Driven Events, The Death of Death by PowerPoint, and Continue the Conversation weren’t provocations so much as admissions that the old script wasn’t working. Sessions on applied improv, social gaming, and hands-on challenges suggested that people were searching for permission to play, to experiment, and to let meaning emerge rather than be delivered.
Technology hovered constantly in the background, but rarely as the point. Hybrid and virtual audiences were discussed with an unusual seriousness for the time, not as broadcast problems but as moral ones. How much agency did remote participants deserve? When did inclusion become dilution? Long before the industry had reliable platforms, EventCamp participants were already arguing that hybrid was a design question, not a technical fix.
In Vancouver, the tone shifted again. Environmental responsibility stopped being a conversation and became a constraint. Sustainability was folded into how the event was produced and experienced, not just how it was discussed. In Washington, D.C., participation collided with hierarchy, and facilitation quietly transformed into a form of governance, a way of managing power rather than escaping it.
What’s striking now is how little of this feels dated. The apps are gone. The platforms have changed. But the questions that animated those rooms—about agency, trust, learning, inclusion, and responsibility—remain stubbornly unresolved. EventCamp wasn’t predicting the future. It was naming the discomfort of a present that no longer fit.
Who Was There (A Community-Built Record)
This list reflects participants, organizers, facilitators, and contributors identified through archived agendas, contemporary commentary, and community input. EventCamp was intentionally porous by design, and this record is not exhaustive. If you were part of EventCamp and do not see your name here, consider this an open invitation to help complete the archive. This is a living, community-built record. Links are included where confirmed. If we missed you or you can help refine the archive, please contact David@GatheringPoint.com..
Jillian (Weinstein) Benson
Beth Brodovsky
Paige Buck
Kelly Clarke
Casey Collins
Stefania Conti-Vecchi
Lindy Dreyer
Ellen Dudley
Emma Gabrielsson
Ruth Gregg
Ray Hansen
Elizabeth Henderson
Wendi Haughty
Barbara Hill
Danalynne Menegus (Wheeler)
Mike McAllen
Mike McCurry
Marc Smith
Judy Kucharuk
Judy Laine
Karen Levine
CeCe Lee
Liz Rice
Lynn Randall
Greg Ruby
Sarah Vining
William Thomson
Nancy Zavada
Selected EventCamp Archives & Contemporary Sources
The following links are primary artifacts and contemporaneous commentary from the EventCamp era. They are included to document how the events were conceived, experienced, and understood at the time, not to redirect readers away from the story above.
EventCamp NYC 2010 – Archived Agenda (Roger Smith Hotel) https://web.archive.org/web/20100111014522/https://eventcamp.conferencespot.org/meetings
EventCamp East Coast 2010 (Philadelphia) – Contemporary Analysis by Howard Givner “The Un-Conference: Participant-Driven Agenda Mashup Networking Relationship Building on Steroids” https://web.archive.org/web/20110412063132/https://howardgivner.com/articles/the-un-conference-participant-driven-agenda-mashup-networking-relationship-building-on-steroids
EventCamp National Conference 2011 (Chicago) – Archived Site & Program
https://web.archive.org/web/20110225132553/http://www.eventcamp.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20110210002138/http://www.eventcamp.org/national-conference/eventcamp-2011-national-conference/
EventCamp Twin Cities 2011 – Archived Site, Program, and History
https://web.archive.org/web/20120428040707/http://eventcamptwincities.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120422062126/http://eventcamptwincities.com/detailed-program-2011/
https://web.archive.org/web/20120422062131/http://eventcamptwincities.com/history/
EventCamp Europe 2011 – Hybrid & Audience-Centric Formats (Official Post)
https://eventcampeu.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/event-camp-europe-set-to-highlight-hybrid-events-audience-centric-meeting-formats/
EventCamp East Coast II (DC Metro) – Official Site
https://eventcampec.wordpress.com/
Andrea Sullivan on Why She Loves EventCamp East Coast (2011)
https://eventcampec.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/brain-researcher-andrea-sullivan-on-why-she-loves-event-camp-east-coast/
What a nostalgic set of memories and wonderful scaffolding of exploring the power of remote connectivity and social networks in the early days before we really needed it. And pretty incredible the foresight of needing this skill and attitude has proven pivotal since. Thanks for this wonderful write up David, it was also the place we first met in person at EventCamp TwinCites in it’s second edition in Minneapolis - #ECTC11 #grateful