Yesterday, after sitting there quietly minding its own business for over a month, my post LITACamp: How much would you pay? received twelve comments.

Mostly, I’m posting now just to get you to go back to that comment thread and catch up, but here are a few thoughts anyway, partly provoked by my conversation with Iris Jastram (whom I hope will either comment here herself or post something to Pegasus Librarian).

The idea of the “unconference” or “library camp” is only a few years old, and people have different associations when they hear the term. For some people, the defining characteristic of the library unconference is that it is free to attendees. For others, it’s that the event is local and informal, or that it lacks any pre-scheduled sessions or keynotes, or that the schedule is created by the attendees on the day of the event.

That’s not to imply that people are so rigid that they can’t imagine an unconference that doesn’t meet their defining characteristic. But I do think that for those people who think “no registration fee” when they hear “library camp” or “unconference” will immediately think twice about an event with even a relatively modest fee. Those who expect a fully-unstructured schedule will wonder about an event with a keynote speaker or pecha kucha sessions. And so on.

For my part, I think one of the great things about the unconference format is that it can be whatever the attendees decide it is, and that many different kinds of events can fluorish. As long as people are interested in doing unconferences, there will be a spectrum from borderline anarchy to fairly buttoned-down events with a bit of flexibility in the schedule.

The only really surprising thing to me was in one of Roy Tennant’s comments where he mentions that LITA is expecting to lose money on their LITACamp, despite the fact that registration starts at $150 for members. I find that rather shocking if it is true, and if I were a LITA member, I’d be asking to see some spreadsheets.