Structure and unStructure

At the end of the first day of IGT2009 conference, a meeting called CloudCamp was organized.
The meeting was organized by Reuven Cohen who is the founder and CTO of Enomaly.
CloudCamp is actually an unconference on Cloud issues. Reuven told us that it was first came into being when a group of people tried to answer the question of "What is Cloud Computing?".
The idea of an unconference is not new. There are many unconferences around the world on various subjects. Unconference is an informal meeting which lacks a rigid predefined agenda and schedule. Only the topic is defined and the discussion can go wherever the audience wants to take it.
I didn't stay for the whole meeting, But I stayed enough to enjoy the idea of an unconference, even though it was the first unconference I participated.
The meeting began with 3 lightning talks from the three funding companies. A lightning talk is a five minutes talk which is not supposed to be the company pitch, but often it is.
Then there was an unpanel. The idea was to choose five people from the crowed who will be the panelists. The remaining crowed is asking the questions and the unpanelists should answer them to the best of their ability. To my surprise this was a very interesting panel discussion. The idea of giving a small amount of structure to the crowed was very helpful. When you compare it to a regular talk you realize that the structure of a panel really helps the discussion even if the panelists are just members of the crowed.
I think the whole idea of CloudCamp and unconference can be compared to the idea of Cloud Computing itself. In the CloudCamp the droplets are people, while in Cloud Computing the droplets are computing nodes. The idea is putting enough structure to make it interesting, but not too much structure. This idea of going on the boundary of Structure is shared between CloudCamp and Cloud Computing. The surprisingly good things that come out of unStructure elements are also shared between CloudCamp and Cloud Computing.
This tension between Structure and unStructure is a recurring theme in other ideas which became popular in recent years. Such ideas include the agile development methodology, Free Software bazaar, the Dynamic Infrastructure pushed by IBM and NOSQL.
As an architect, this is one of the most interesting tensions, if an architect solves this tension he can do wonders to the system. Since this tension involves a lot of non-linear phenomena, it is very hard for the human mind to understand all implications of this tension. We need to develop better conceptual tools in order to analyze and control the tension between Structure and unStructure. These tools will enable us to architect robust and long lasting systems of many kinds.

Khen Ofek