Bootleg classroom

I've had the idea kicking around in my head that it'd be pretty fun to make a more informal teaching and skill-sharing environment for adults. It'd be something like a mini-conference environment, where people split up into small groups, but with an unconference-style lack of structure.

At the start of each meeting you'd go around the group and ask each person for a list of things they know about and would be willing to share, which you turn into a big topic list for the event. Everyone groups up by the topics they'd like to be involved with - either learning or teaching. This bit would be a bit tricky because you can only be in one group at a time, but if people just kept moving to their next available preference it should converge on a stable solution.

Once your groups are sorted out, everyone splits off and runs their individual sessions. Depending on how much time you have, you could probably run a few of them. Ideally it'd be a pretty fun and informal teaching environment where, over time, everyone learns a bit of whatever they're interested in. If you ran these for long enough, it would probably settle down into a cluster of general meetups as people's skills develop.

I think there's a lot of room for innovation in the way we do community-building, especially in the tech community. Right now there are only a few, fairly unambitious formats like casual drink meetups, talks, and occasional hackathons. Taking existing top-down formats and democratising them seems like a pretty rich vein to tap.