The Best Conferences Have No Speakers

Last week our team at SuperPlane organized a DevOps Unconference. We split into groups, picked our own topics, and talked for hours about data privacy regulations, DevOps automation, AI agents for observability. Just people in a room who actually care about the stuff they work on every day.

It was one of the best events we’ve hosted.

This wasn’t my first unconference. I first experienced the format back in 2014 at CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference. That one left a mark on me. Over a decade later, it’s still one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended.

Think about that. A free event without celebrity speakers or pre-approved slide decks, and yet it beats the thousand-dollar conferences with their catered lunches and swag bags. How?

Because most conferences are broken.

Here’s how a typical conference works: an organizing committee picks speakers months in advance. Those speakers prepare talks based on what they think the audience wants to hear. The audience shows up and sits in rows, passively absorbing content chosen for them by someone else. If you’re lucky, there are five minutes for questions at the end. If you’re really lucky, the questions aren’t just self-promotion disguised as curiosity.

An unconference flips all of that.

Nobody knows the agenda when they walk in. The attendees propose the topics that morning, and you vote with your feet. If a session isn’t working for you, you leave and join another one. That’s not rude, it’s expected.

The result is something you almost never get at regular conferences: real conversation. Not someone talking at you, but people talking with each other. People who actually do the work, sharing what they’ve learned, asking what they don’t know, arguing about tradeoffs without performing for an audience. Just the work.

The best insights I’ve ever gotten from a conference didn’t come from a polished 45-minute keynote. They came from a 20-minute conversation in a circle of chairs, where someone said “we tried that and it failed, here’s why” and someone else said “interesting, we had the opposite experience.” That’s where the real knowledge lives. In the gaps between what people are willing to say on stage and what they’ll say when they’re just talking to peers.

Conferences spend enormous energy on production value. Better AV, bigger venues, famous speakers. None of that matters if the format prevents the most valuable thing from happening: people connecting with each other around problems they actually have.

An unconference trusts the attendees. It says: you are interesting enough, your problems are worth discussing, and your experience is the content. That’s a radical idea in an industry obsessed with thought leaders and influencers.

This matters more now than it did in 2014. We spend most of our working day talking to AI. We code with copilots, we write with assistants, we debug with chatbots. The work is increasingly solitary. We’re getting better at producing output and worse at connecting with the people around us.

That’s exactly why getting into a room together matters so much. Not to watch someone present at you from a stage. To actually sit across from someone, hear how they think about a problem, and realize you’re not the only one struggling with it.

I’ve been to conferences with thousands of attendees and walked away with nothing. I’ve been to unconferences with thirty people and walked away with ideas that changed how I work.

The format matters more than the budget.

If you haven’t been to an unconference, go to one. And if there isn’t one in your city, organize one. It doesn’t take much. A room, a whiteboard, a time slot, and people who give a damn. That’s it.

The best conferences have no speakers. They only have participants.