Barcamps (also commonly called unconferences) have been increasingly the rage for the past 3-4 years. Rather than peaking, the concept appears stronger than ever. In fact, it seems like my inbox has recently been flooded with barcamp invitations…and they aren’t just for techies.

Recent and upcoming barcamp invitations that I’ve received have featured themes ranging from product development, to entrepreneurship, to better government. The public sector, in fact, seems to have gone barcamp-crazy. Colleagues Anthony Williams and Alex Marshall have chronicled barcamps in these pages already this year.

As an organization that evangelizes mass collaboration, it shouldn’t be a surprise that nGenera has been a sponsor of E2Open, the official unconference for one of the industry’s higher profile annual conferences, Enterprise 2.0. We’ve co-sponsored it for the past 2 years with our friends at SocialText and there have been some terrific discussions and presentations produced as a result.

But, here’s the history of barcamps that many who associate them with tech-oriented origins don’t know: the origins of the modern barcamp are nearly 25 years old! Begun under the semi-clunky name “open space meetings,” the modern version was dreamt up by a diverse bunch of souls, heavily dominated by org dev and other liberal arts majors that agreed to break the rules and try something new.

The open space meeting (now coined “Open space technology“) was born. I knew when I got my first barcamp invitation back in 2006 that this concept felt eerily familiar. The reason for the familiarity was that I had participated in my first barcamp-by-another-name a decade earlier. I remember it well, as it was such an unfamiliar way to conduct a learning session.

The open space format was the principal meeting method for the capstone retreat of a year-long Austin leadership program for which I had been selected, called Leadership Austin. I remember vividly sitting around in a giant circle of more than 50 people in a very large, conference room, uncluttered by tables, powerpoint projectors, or other gadgets.

The rules were, to say the least, unconventional compared to any meeting that I’d participated in, up to that point. Looking them over again, I still marvel at their simple power. The barcamp/unconference generation has developed its own iteration of meeting protocol as well. But, if you are considering a barcamp in your future – either as a participant, presenter, or both – I urge you to scan the original. I think you’ll appreciate their elegance and the insight that this group of liberal arts innovators had to produce such a powerful form of in-person collaboration.