I’m working with the Slugger O’Toole weblog and Amplified ’09 in doing this, and we’re hoping to have sixteen sessions (that’s how many we have time and space for) – each one initiated by attendees.

The most exciting thing about this is that it will have an urgent and collaborative feel to it. Unlike other political conferences, there will be nothing at stake. We won’t be hammering out any composite motions or resolutions. We won’t be agreeing a set of demands that we are going to put to MPs or to the leadership of any political party.

Instead, we’ll be putting the onus on each other to come up with ideas that can change the game – and in Northern Ireland, there are plenty of games that have gone every far into extra time. There is no reward here for unrealistic idealism or sloppy thinking.

It’s about bringing people together – many of whom have never met before – and getting them talking to each other about how they can co-operate and collaborate. It’s the first event of it’s kind, and one that we’d like to roll out elsewhere – if it works in Belfast.

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Last week, myself and Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole launched PICamp. We did it using a free-of-charge Ning website and the whole development took about an hour – soup-to-nuts (as they say in the film industry).

Mick put a couple of posts on Slugger O’Toole to get a bit of interest and within a few days we had over fifty people signed up on the site. On Friday lunchtime, I set up a PICamp Twitter account. I found a handful of key political twitterers in Northern Ireland and followed all of the contacts that they have as followers / followees. Within a short time I had nearly 1,000 people that are likely to be interested finding out about PICamp for the first time in a fairly unobtrusive way.

Over 140 twitterers were following PICamp back within 24 hours and the numbers have grown steadily since.

Anti-spam purists (and by most standards, that description fits me quite well) may find this slighlty objectionable, but by any utilitarian calculation, I’d argue that it’s OK to use a permissive system to market a non-profit conference about how social media can improve politics. 

Getting 2-300 people in the door of an unconference in London is fairly easy these days. BarCamp Belfast attracted similar numbers using a template that social media geeks would be waiting for.

Politicos, however, are another matter altogether. If we can pull something like this around, attracting around eighty people  for an afternoon of lively debate (on a weekday during a European Election campaign) I think it will demonstrate quite a strong convening power – bearing in mind that the whole of Northern Ireland’s total population is 1.7million – about a quarter of London.

None of this is that original. Kathryn Corrick helped to organise a set of Digital Britain Unconferences recently, and provides a good briefing in the basics of how to do this.

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