The Conference You Actually Want To Go To

No agenda, no keynotes and no sales pitches. No PowerPoint presentations, no suits and no egos (well, not as many as usual).

When you attend an “unconference”, none of the usual rules apply. Crowd-sourcing determines the content of the event, which begins with an empty whiteboard to be filled by attendees with ideas for discussions. Everyone is expected to participate and contribute.

Tim O’Reilly, one of the pioneers of the format through Foo (Friends Of O’Reilly) Camp, describes it as “the wiki of conferences”. It’s democratic, at times anarchic and everything your standard “speeches followed by drinks and networking” conference is not.

Since 2007 WPP has been running its own unconference, called Stream. The most recent took place last month at its longstanding home in an architecturally challenged but gloriously situated former Club Med on the shores of Marathon in Greece.

As ever it brought together WPP clients and industry leaders to discuss our digital future and what it means for communications, creativity and business.

Co-hosted by “the grandfather of Israeli innovation” and Kinnernet founder Yossi Vardi, Stream attracts a diverse crowd: everyone from client CEOs and rising stars within WPP to marketers, start-ups, VCs, social entrepreneurs, publishers, academics, film-makers and media types.

You go not as a delegate but a participant. Collaboration is valued over hierarchy, discussions over statements.

And if all this sounds like I’ve belatedly been captured by the spirit of Woodstock, or – worse – sucked into Silicon Valley’s buzzword hell, fear not. There’s nothing woolly-minded, indulgent or slavish about Stream.

The event asks a lot of people, in various different ways. Orthodoxies are challenged, intellects stretched and pretensions pricked. You’re also forcibly encouraged to have as much fun as possible on very little sleep. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and the somewhat spartan, wifi-less Club Med bedrooms don’t offer much in the way of refuge.

The weather brought an additional twist: this year’s Stream experience was not so much immersive as submersive, as a once-in-a-lifetime Mediterranean storm left parts of the venue under half a foot of water and Stream became a flood.

Needless to say, the guests – who ranged from the director of Ford’s Connected Car programme to the editor of Britain’s biggest selling newspaper and 16-year-old YouTube star Alexis G Zall – were unfazed, and even more involved as a result of the rain.

Other organisations represented included Apple, IBM, Google, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Buzzfeed, Diageo, MailOnline, Viacom, Burning Man, Shazam, Mondelez, Twitter, Colgate Palmolive, Etsy, Nestlé, P&G, Unilever, GlaxoSmithKline, Microsoft, Vodafone, Maker Studios, Mode Media, Adobe, AppNexus, AOL, YuMe, RebelMouse, Fuisz Media, Facebook, Videology, Acquia and Vice.

Among the morsels on the menu of over 200 talks were: “Artificial Intelligence: will it overwhelm us?”; “The future of news for millennials”; “Crowdfunding: how the little guy wins”; “Are we becoming illiterate?”; “What I discovered living inside Instagram”; “Seven reasons mobile is king in Africa”; “Are wearables a scam?”; and “Can there be a future without ads?” (didn’t like that one).

Elsewhere on the Stream campus there were demonstrations of the (potentially) revolutionary virtual reality headset Oculus Rift, the now-obligatory flight of the drones, the seat-of-your-pants experience that is an Ignite talk (15 slides and 15 seconds to present each of them) and IBM’s Watson: the cognitive technology that “interacts with humans on human terms” and can “read and understand natural language.”

But what captured the collective imagination most of all was The Pitch – a kind of Dragon’s Den for ideas that tackle real-world problems. The brief, set by Save The Children, was to come up with ways of using media and technology to support people affected by the Ebola crisis.

Seven teams worked round the clock for three days before pitching their concepts in just two minutes on the final evening. Financial backing was pledged to one solution on the spot. A major client agreed to support another. One group had developed a working website and app overnight.

The focus, determination and inventiveness on display were remarkable, and Save The Children left with several actionable ideas to help in the fight against the disease.

After The Pitch, marking the end of Stream, everyone who had actively participated in some way was thanked and asked to stand up. By the end of the roll call, the whole room was standing, stamping and cheering.

How many conferences do you go to where that happens?