Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
If you have never been to an Open World before and you are planning on going this year you will first have to deal with the general "Shock & Awe" of the size of the thing. Once you move past that you will likely be buried deep in trying to figure out what sessions to attend and a fair bit of social networking. At some point you are bound to notice this odd thing called Unconference. Un-what? It is called the Unconference, and it is a pretty neat concept.
This is a place where rookies as well as professional presenters can setup a session about what they feel is important with information they want to share with the community. Similar to the other presentations you go to you may (or may not) see a demonstration, a PowerPoint or some other kind of general presentation, but these tend to be less formal all the way up to entirely adhoc. You can check out the time slots and the proposed sessions here:
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/Oracle+Open World+Unconference?t=anon
Unfortunately at this time I do not see much on Fusion ECM. However, over on the Bex Huff blog he has indicated recently he may give his Enterprise 2.0 Rant presentation at the Oracle Open World Unconference. If you would like to get a sneak peek then head over and check out some of the info he's already got available on that subject:
http://bexhuff.com/2008/07/enterprise-2-0-rant-available-for-all
He also talks about some additional items he will be presenting here:
http://bexhuff.com/2008/08/six-weeks-till-open-world
Unconference is not for everyone all the time, but it certainly is a good compliment to the "structured" presetnations deployed throughout the rest of the conference. Each year is different, but the value of this particular part is soley dependent on the efforts put forth by the community. So, if Unconference flops this year, I guess it is on us.