Ignite Skepticism will launch tomorrow at #DragonCon #Skeptrack in Atlanta

Back in June I wrote a post about innovative mixes of curation and crowdsourcing that I’ve seen skeptic events adding these days. I included some ideas that (to my knowledge) have not yet been tried at the end of that post.

At DragonCon 2014 in Atlanta on Monday, I am going to curate an attempt at one of those new ideas (previously mentioned in my schedule here)! It’s called Ignite Skepticism, and it consists of a series of 5-minute lightning talks.

I hope many of you who are attending the event right now will attend this session, which is in the Skeptrack room, 204 to 207 in the Hilton hotel. The session begins Monday at 10am.

But let me tell you a little bit more about what Ignite is all about…

Mixing curation and crowdsourcing in skeptic event planning

Neil deGrasse Tyson at TAM9 by Jamie Bernstein, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0

As the annual schedule of skeptic and freethought events continues to expand, there’s more variation and experimentation going on. Specifically, some skeptic conferences are mixing old and new techniques in creating their schedule of events. They’re combining old-school curation with newer crowdsourcing techniques.

Traditional skeptic conferences – those run by CFI, JREF and so on – have been heavily curated affairs. The sponsoring organization and planning committee have complete control over all content presented, which is sometimes planned up to a year in advance. One slight exception are the Sunday Papers at The Amazing Meeting, which has an open submission process with an approval committee.

In 2007 my friend Reed Esau broke the mold by bringing the “unconference” model (from the world of high-tech) to skeptic events, and Skepticamp was born. These events solicit all their presentations from attendees, and only lightly curate the content (if at all). This idea was borrowed from the high tech world where the constant need for new knowledge and skills transfer did not fit well with the curated model. (The high-tech prototype for Skepticamp was called Barcamp). Reed’s idea has been very successful – there have been 84 events held since the first one in 2007, and they’ve been held all over the world.

Now in 2014, several skeptic/secular events are starting to experiment in other ways. Find how after the jump.