We Help Grounded Visionaries Spark Movement

You see the untapped potential in your domain for values-aligned individuals and organisations to come together as a (more) coherent, aligned, profoundly generative co-creative field. We enable you to actually make it happen. When a density of aligned people come together, ideas can transform into collaborations, talk becomes workshop, and form and action are given to the words of our hearts.

We all have unpotentiated generative tension waiting to be discovered, and unconferences are one way to constructively realize and activate that energy.

Working draft — content in progress

As the Field

A playfully serious venture oriented toward collaborative emergence.

As the Field supports organizations in hosting virtual or hybrid unconferences designed to elicit emergent collective intelligence and facilitate generative converastion and contrast in the service of engaging participants and organizers alike in co-creating events based in relevant topics and themes. We coach you through every step — from the initial spark to the final debrief.

For organizations, communities, and networks ready to bring people together around a question that matters who are looking for support in holding the space.

Request a Consultation

In Plain Language

We work with organizations, groups, and companies to:

  • Help you figure out what you want
  • Help you co-develop sessions with participants
  • Help encourage participants to host sessions
  • Provide support to organizers to keep the event focused enough
  • Support enough structure to allow timely and relevant topics to spontaneously arise
  • Provide ways for organizers, hosts, and participants to learn from all sessions
  • Support all with references about unconference themes

New to the Language?

We're building a shared vocabulary for this work — unconference, sourcekeeper, kernel, and more. Explore the terms below.

Browse Field Language

What We Do

As consultants, we support sourcekeepers and organizers in hosting unconferences. Our role is to coach and equip organizers and participants as needed to feel confident in facilitating the hosting of calls and the engagement of potential tensions, as well as providing digital materials of usable information (artefacts) that will carry them forward after the unconference.

Coach the Sourcekeeper

Coaching looks like video calls — talking through overwhelm, loss of spark, which parts feel challenging, and what's big but realistic in terms of near-term and future goals. Typically weekly, plus as-needed, with some text-based messages of support in between.

Build Supporting Teams

We invite volunteering at every turn, then work with those volunteers until they feel capable in their responsibilities. This isn't about filling seats with warm bodies — roles emerge from what feels necessary, interesting, and engaging to the people taking them on. Engagement here is alive for the volunteer.

Support Generative Co‑Creation

We help hosts understand emergence and co-creation, letting the gathering build itself with enough structure to hold and enough space for the surprises: new formats, teams, or sessions that become important, and that people want to commit to.

Develop Relevant Artefacts

Often an unconference ends and there's nothing to point back to — scattered notes, long recordings, transcripts nobody will watch. We help generate (or support the generation of) artefacts your team can actually use afterward for sense-making, meaning-making, and taking action: a Miro or Mural board, a geographic map, a custom app (or several), a phone tree, an evocative image, an audio artefact — whatever fits what happened.

Every engagement starts the same way: with conversation about what you want. Before we talk tools or timelines, we want to understand why this gathering matters and what you hope people feel when they leave it. From there, support is modular — take what you need:

We work primarily in virtual settings at this time. In-person engagements may be considered on a case-by-case basis and would be discussed and worked out together during an initial video call.

Roles We Might Help People Grow Into

Fun Title, Real Role

Beyond the Sourcekeeper (the one who holds the kernel or spark of what the event will be about), unconferences may discover a handful of roles that are rarely identified explicitly. We give them names, partly because it's useful, but partly because we think the work deserves a little delight and recognition.

A few examples: someone to steward the original vision, someone who holds space for productive friction, someone who notices dynamics nobody's naming yet. Here's the full list:

Vision Integrity Steward

Keeps day-to-day decisions honest to the original intent of the gathering.

Strategic Friction Facilitator

Makes room for healthy disagreement before it hardens into conflict.

Micro-Resolution Steward

Catches the small frustrations early — those tend to do more damage over time than any single big blow-up.

Scope & Coherence Minder

Protects the event from quietly growing past what organizers can actually support, and helps tell a good idea from a distraction.

Engagement & Vitality Lead

Reconnects everyone to the point of the gathering, celebrates progress, and reminds people of what's alive.

Resource & Feasibility Advisor

Balances enthusiasm against the honest realities of time, staffing, ability (tech and emotional) and capacity.

Role Clarity & Noticer

Pays attention to what isn't being said in words, what seems to be thematic, and what is needed - noticing and giving voice to the moments.

Narrative & Artefact Lead

Documents the unfolding event — patterns, stories, decisions — into living artefacts the community can keep using after the closing session.

We don't hand roles to any team. The emerge as the unconference unfolds. We help you figure out which ones you actually need, coach whoever picks them up, and keep it human-centered before it's ever templated — relationships first, playbooks later.

Technology Serves Intention, Not the Other Way Around

Tools and workflows stay in the background, doing their job unassumingly, so the conversation remains the main event.

What Is an Unconference?

A gathering format where the agenda takes shape from the people in the room, close to the moment — not months in advance by a program committee. No keynotes, no hierarchy: anyone can propose a session, and the ideas that matter rise on their own. A short primer follows below.

Topics Chosen Close to the Moment

Traditional conferences generally lock in keynote speakers and topics months in advance. At an unconference, the people hosting sessions choose their topics close to the event itself — because it feels alive, timely, or worth talking about right now. Sessions are added throughout the conference as new energy gathers around previously unconsidered themes.

No Headliners, No Hierarchy

Anyone can add a call — organizer or participant, first-timer or veteran. There's no primary speaker. Some sessions draw more people, some hosts bring more experience, but everyone with a desire to host gets the opportunity to add to the calendar. Good conversations gain attendance rise because people are drawn to them. Authority comes from showing up with something to offer.

Structured for Surprise

This is a close cousin of Open Space Technology: an unconference may have a general theme or a few constraints, but what actually gets discussed — and who leads it — takes shape in the room. Just enough structure to keep things workable, just enough openness for something unexpected and alive to happen. The art is in balancing the dynamics.

Our Approach

Every engagement begins with conversation about what you want. Before we talk tools or timelines, we want to understand why the gathering matters, what success looks like, and what you hope people feel and understand when they leave. Technology should serve human intention and interaction, not replace it. And because relationships come before templates, our recommendations grow out of what we observe and learn with each group, rather than a one-size-fits-all playbook.

About Us

As the Field is a small team of consultants who coach and support the people behind generative unconferences. Here's a bit about each of us — more to come.

Christine Callo

Christine Callo

[Role title]

Christine Joann Callo was born in the Philippines and raised in Seattle since the age of 5. Having a neurodivergent brother gave her an early awareness of differences in worldviews, and her own feelings of "not-quite-fitting-in" led her toward an interdisciplinary path studying Biology and Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) at the University of Washington, then completing a Masters in Whole Systems Design, where she was introduced to systems thinking, Spiral Dynamics, and Integral Theory. She is a co-founder of VillageCo, an organization focused on deepening neighborhood connections and relationships. Being a co-founder of As the Field feeds her propensity toward co-creation, big-picture thinking, multi-perspective taking, stewarding emergence, synthesizing, and holding space for relational containers.

Danielle Johnson

Danielle Johnson

[Role title]

Dr. Danielle Johnson brings a background spanning personal and professional potentiating, project management, community development, systems thinking, and collective sensemaking to As the Field. She holds an MA in Communication and both an MA and PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, focusing on curiosity, positive psychology, leadership development, and metacognition. Through her consulting practice, Everyone Welcome, she works on the ground in DeKalb, Illinois and the greater Midwest, building community maps, developing outreach strategy, mentoring emergent leaders, and supporting neighborhood organizing for initiatives like Opportunity DeKalb and Regen Midwest. She is also the co-founder of Limicon, an online open-space convention bringing together practitioners, artists, and sensemakers in the metacrisis field.

Mari Budlong

Mari Budlong

[Role title]

Mari Budlong is a mother of four, sister to four, a veteran, coach, and multi-faceted human who believes our humanity is worth tending as we grow alongside our quickly evolving technology. With a deep concern for the relational and ecological impacts of our choices — digital and otherwise — she brings heart, humor, and wonder to conversations where tech meets soul.

Field Language

A few terms we use often. We'll keep adding to this list.

Artefact
A living output from an unconference — a process map, framework, decision record, or reflective essay — that keeps helping a community long after the event ends.
Co-create
To build a session, conversation, or outcome together with participants, rather than delivering something predetermined to an audience.
Debrief
The structured reflection that happens after an unconference ends: what happened, what surprised people, what's still unresolved, and what's worth turning into an artefact so it isn't lost.
Emergence
What arises from a group's interaction rather than being decided on in advance. It's the thing unconferences are built to make room for: not a lack of structure, but structure loose enough that something nobody planned can still show up.
Enthusiastic Drift
The very normal, very human tendency for excited participants to nudge a session (or the whole event) somewhere new. Not a personality problem — a predictable dynamic we help redirect with a light touch.
Facilitation
A way of hosting in which the facilitator is also a participant. There's an easing (from facil-) of the call — it's held, not controlled — allowing room for emergence while still maintaining the enabling constraints that keep things workable.
Generative Tension
A disagreement or friction that, when held well, opens up new understanding or possibility rather than shutting conversation down.
Kernel (or Spark)
The idea — the thing that lights someone up — the piece of an unconference that needs to stay lit and true no matter what shape everything else takes. Only the sourcekeeper can really know if the spark is dimming, or if the kernel has been chiseled away enough to become meaningless or distinctly different from where it started.
Open Space Technology
A well-established meeting format that unconferences borrow heavily from: participants build the actual agenda together, sometimes at the beginning of the gathering, sometimes unfolding throughout the event, rather than being set months ahead by organizers.
Participant-Host
Someone attending an unconference who also proposes and holds a session. Not a separate category of person — just what happens when a participant's curiosity turns into an invitation for others to join them.
Residue
The leftover emotional weight that can linger after a disagreement is technically "resolved." We build in small practices to help groups notice and release it, rather than carry it into the next thing.
Sourcekeeper
The person — or small group — who carries the original energy and intent for a gathering. We coach and support this role; we never try to become it.
Unconference
A gathering format in which the agenda is shaped largely by participants rather than set in advance by organizers — sessions emerge from the questions people bring on the day.

Request a Consultation

Tell us a bit about your group and what you're hoping to gather people around. We'll follow up to schedule a conversation.

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