The Topic of the session he was in charge of facilitating was: “E-mail Sucks!”

That was how Ben Christen, manager of technology at Walt Disney Internet Group in Burbank, Calif., knew that this was going to be no ordinary meeting.

“It was a little surreal,” says Christen, one of 135 employees who gathered for the division's second unconference (known as “Pooh Camp”), held in March at Disney's Golden Oaks Ranch, north of Los Angeles. The company's goal: to loosen the collars and free the flow of discussion among the entertainment monolith's tech experts.

Pooh Camp is a play on the name of the unconference that inspired it: O'Reilly Media's “Friends of O'Reilly” event — or Foo Camp, for short. It's part of a growing wave of like-minded, chaotic ventures with names such as “Mashup Camp,” “BarCamp,” and “BrainJams” that are shaking up the geek meeting world.

For Disney, it all started a couple of years ago when Mike Pusateri, senior vice president of technology for the Disney/ABC Television Group, “came to us very excited from his Foo Camp experience with the O'Reilly folks,” says Dennis Kuba, vice president of advanced technology in Disney's Corporate New Technology Department. “He encouraged us to do [our own] version of that. Our department organizes a number of enterprise-level tech gatherings for the company. We have, for example, a quarterly New Technology Forum that gathers 200 to 800 new media technology executives. We bring in industry speakers and highlight technologies. The idea that Mike brought was interesting because it was the polar opposite of that. Instead of us planning it, it plans itself.”

Pick Your Topic

Attendees arrived at the Golden Oaks Ranch to find 16 blank whiteboards set in semicircles under a stand of majestic trees. People were expected to write down the topics they wanted to lead, and then convene with others interested in those topics for a set time period.

The blank whiteboards were a sign, in a way, that the whole thing could go horribly wrong. Maybe no one would sign up to lead a meeting. Or maybe everyone wanted to lead, and no one wanted to follow. Or maybe the people stepping forward had an ax to grind.

Fortunately for Pusateri and Kuba, everyone there genuinely wanted to push the company forward in frank, positive ways. “Worrying about the topics and filling them up was a great discussion before we started,” Pusateri says. “But ultimately, that was never an issue. The real issue was, ‘there are two [sessions happening] at the same time; I wanted to go to both of them.’”

“A few topics I looked at and said, ‘That sounds boring as hell, I don't want to go to that!’” Pusateri admits.

To their credit, most of the people who signed up to lead Pooh Camp sessions came prepared to drop multiple thought bombs on their associates from Disney's many represented business divisions. While the Disney company looks like one entity from the outside, it's really many companies and businesses, ranging from Walt Disney World and Disneyland to Buena Vista Music, Cable Networks Group (including ESPN and ABC Family), Disney Interactive Studios, Walt Disney Imagineering, ABC TV in New York, and many more. Not everyone in this vast organization knows their counterparts in other parts of the company. Yet these people can be resources to one another, a fact that was largely unaddressed until they were introduced — accidentally-on-purpose — at Pooh Camp.

At the 800-acre private ranch, where dozens of films, from Old Yeller to Independence Day, have been filmed, attendees were in for a 12-hour day that started at 8 a.m. and finished three meals and many breakouts later. The first Pooh Camp, held in 2006, could have had twice as many attendees and twice as many presentations, so this year's organizers nearly doubled attendance, from 75 to 135, and tripled the number of presentation slots, from 39 to more than 100.

Camp organizers put the old ranch to work in a number of ways. There were meetings in Disney's cabin and on the back patio, and the Golden Oak Hall was split into four spaces. A ship's bell clanged to start and finish the dozen or more simultaneous sessions, each allotted an hour. Between meals, tables in the mess hall tent were taken over by scheduled, as well as impromptu, discussions. Even during meals, almost every table had a theme; at lunch, a discussion of Apple Inc. drew more people than there were seats available.

Another sign that this wasn't your typical meeting: The cybernetics folks unleashed a flying mechanical dragonfly in the tent with this warning: “If you treat your robot nice, he'll play with you nice. If you're aggressive, he'll bite you.”

But Back to “E-mail Sucks!”

Ben Christen doesn't really think that e-mail sucks. But he doesn't think that it's the best solution for all of a corporation's communications needs — and that's really his point. Seated in a comfortable upholstered chair, iBook in his lap, Wi-Fi Internet access in the air, and the audience's rapt attention on the screen where his PowerPoint presentation appeared, Christen wanted his fellow cast members to think about alternatives.

“E-mail is too inclusive — and too exclusive,” he began. “If someone joins your team later on, they don't have access to the information you previously shared in e-mail.” As Christen shared his ideas for solving the e-mail quandary, other conversations were happening in the room. A woman at the dining room table answered e-mail on her laptop. A man perched on the kitchen island whispered to another attendee about something provocative that Christen had said.

Outside the kitchen window, another group gathered for a completely different purpose: Split into two teams, the attendees had to silently yet cooperatively build structures for transporting materials with brightly colored Legos. By design, this was one of the only recurring sessions, intended so that everyone had a shot at it.

Doug Parrish is chief technology officer for the Walt Disney Internet Group. He signed up to lead a discussion on digital rights management, titled “Does DRM Matter Anymore?” He thought there might be one person in attendance; there were 30. “Pooh Camp lets us be less reverent about topics,” he says. “And some of the more successful topics are the contrarians.”

Meanwhile, in Golden Oak Hall, an interactive presentation on the cost of media piracy opened many eyes. In a casual, relaxed presentation, the speaker made his point. As in most of the sessions, it was more of a conversation and less of a lecture, although most speakers arrived with slides and, most important, knowledge to impart.