We took what we learned from the popular Arbortext Monster Garage virtual meeting series and the overwhelming requests we received from the first annual TC Camp held in Santa Clara in January 2013 and blended them together. The result — a new twist on the typical web session.

Back in January (2013), we organized and ran the first unconference for the TechComm community: TC Camp. In case you don't know what an unconference is, it's an event where the attendees suggest discussion topics to the entire group on the day of the event. Voting is done in real time, and sessions are scheduled into the agenda based on audience interest.

There are no juried presentations, no death by powerpoint. Only real conversations of topics of interest to those in attendence. Conversations are facilitated by a leader and documented by a scribe. They are also reported on at the end of the day so everyone can learn from every session -- whether they attended it or not.

It was a great experience and the feedback was so amazingly positive that we'll be doing it again next year, but in the meantime, we wanted to try and figure out how we could keep the spirit of the unconference alive during the year in a different format.

We came up with TC Dojo. There are three ways to learn at the dojo:

1. Open Sessions which are free and open to the public. In this dojo, we cover a wide range of topics appropriate for a wide range of practitioners from the beginner to the advanced.
2. Master Series Sessions which are facilitated discussions among a small group of peers. In this dojo, we delve deeper into individual issues in a supportive, confidential environment. There is a small fee to attend these members-only sessions. 
3. Private Sessions which are one-on-one sessions between you and one of the TC Dojo masters. In this dojo, you can ask questions and get advice on issues specific to you.

TC Dojo Open Session Topics will be selected by the attendees and can cover anything of concen to Technical Communcations professionals such as architectural design, analysis or tools. Now, we admit that go get rolling we've pre-selected some of the early topics with sessions that were voted on during the TC Camp. However, we have also solicited topic voting and feedback from the community so we can find and book appropriate speakers based on the results.

For more information about TC Camp, go to tccamp.org. We've posted the agenda and session summaries from the 2013 event (well, at least all those that were made available for posting), so you can learn too and see what kinds of sessions were suggested and voted into the agenda. It was really a great set of topics!

And if you want to learn more about the TC Dojo, go to tcdojo.org. You'll find information about all three dojos, the schedule proposed so far, and a link for voting on future sessions.

We're looking forward to the TC Dojo and hope you join us there.