The first time I heard of an “unconference” I was very sceptical. No program? No speakers? What kind of conference is that?

Well, it’s the kind of conference in which you skip sitting in the audience falling asleep because the speakers drone on or the panelists are just trying to get you to buy their products. It’s the kind of conference where people speak about what you want them to speak about because you make them to! In other words, a conference that is actually worth attending in person to instead of just watching and fast-forwarding presentations on YouTube.

In a couple of weeks, what looks like the first true unconference on NoSQL and Big Data is going to take place:

I’m planning to be there. I hope to discuss with other attendees things such as:

• key-value stores, document databases, graph databases, column stores etc. are all NoSQL databases. When and why would I choose one vs. another?
• is there a future for NoSQL in the enterprise? Which vendors? What business models?
• what are the requirements for data architectures in the cloud?
• what can we do to drive business adoption of Big Data technologies?
• how does Big Data relate to user-centric data and user-centric web applications?

I’ll bring a few slides on graph databases (such as InfoGrid), too, in case anybody would like me to talk about that. Most of the time I hope to spend discussing and learning and jointly exploring, however, as it usually happens at unconferences.

It will be moderated by good friend Kaliya Hamlin, who has a knack for making unconferences work. (I know, I have gone to all 10 of her very successful Internet Identity Workshops so far.) I’m looking forward to it. She tells me that a leaders and committers of a number of successful NoSQL open-source projects are already registered, so if you ever wanted to corner them for longer than just a few minutes in Q&A, this might be your chance!

See you there!