They call Podcamp, "The New Media Unconference" and it's a fitting sobriquet for a transformative movement that's blossomed from a grassroots rage to a full-blown techie tree. Derived from the barcamp movement, the idea of an "unconference" is that it's an, "ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants." (quoted from the barcamp wiki).

Okay. Sounds simple. Get a large group of like-minded people together who share the same passion(s). Have food nearby. Plus wi-fi. And you're done.

But we've all been to regular "conferences." We've all dressed up and pressed palms and eaten bad sandwiches cling-wrapped to death with pungent, lilting lettuce amidst a table of bored peers who are desperate to build "qualified leads" but know 75% of the business cards they take home end up as doilies within a fortnight. Most conferences don't want you to participate; they want you to observe and potentially soak in the acumen delivered by speakers you've dropped serious coin to hear. It's typically only during their speech you realize they're regurgitating the empowering (but probably general) adages they related in their recent best seller. Which you could have purchased at Barnes & Noble (along with 400 extra lattes) instead of coming to the shebang where you try to get leads and end up with sorry produce.

So here's the thing about Podcamp, and I've only been to one (Podcamp Boston, Sept 9-10, 2006). I discovered the event through my friend Chris Brogan who was one of the organizers. It took a little while to grasp the idea, but in essence, as a "participant" versus an "attendee" I got to go to a wiki (and if you don't know what that is, it just means it's a web page anyone can visit and edit), register, and then list the talk I wanted to give on a particular subject. That was it. Later on I posted that I could drive people if they needed a ride (I live in the NYC area). Three people got in touch so we all rode up together and had a great time.

Then, at the event (for which I didn't pay AND got a free t-shirt AND all my meals for free) I attended about eight different talks. Most I chose for titles alone (versus knowing the speaker). Part of me wondered about the caliber of the talks, and what the content to delivery quotient might look like. Meaning, would I be listening to an in-depth discussion on coding that was obviously informative but to which I couldn't identify?

What's extremely cool is that my expectations weren't really important after about fifteen minutes of attending the event. Once Chris Brogan started speaking and welcoming everyone to Podcamp, I felt like I was part of a movement versus a conference. The room was abuzz with humming laptops and you could almost feel the rush of shifting bandwidth as you looked around the room. Being a techie neophyte, I would have been intimidated by the heavy hitters in attendance if everyone hadn't been so freakin' pleasant. The main point of the event that I took away was that the relevance of everyone's content was what connected us. The truly democratic nature of sharing your passion and information made you "worthy" to speak, whether you were presenting or firing off a challenging quip during (what often turned into) heated Q & A's.

In my experience, it isn't often you get to feel like you're part of a movement, or a group of aligned souls so obviously onto something of major import. In High School, I got a small sense of this fervor doing musicals, but understood even then that the allure of a teenage rendition of South Pacific was largely heady hubris and a great potential way to make out with a cute chorus girl. Podcamp felt much different. I didn't necessarily click with everyone I met, and certainly disagreed with a lot I heard. Some of the content also just wasn't to my taste, so I simply left the room and attended a different talk.

But I felt invited. I felt emphatically embraced by the philosophy surrounding the event, a message that said--if you're here, you're in. Show up and you're a member of a club that works on meritocracy, not money.

So...Podcamp NYC is currently being planned for one of the two first weekends in April and I urge you to sign up and participate. Speak if you'd like or arrange a meeting with a friend or potential business connection. Arrange a drink with a group of videocasters or Second Life enthusiasts. Meet up with MySpace mavens or lunch with LinkedIn-ers.

But come. Demonstrate to Big Media of yore that there is power in bottom-up marketing and transparent communication and connectivity. The marketplace of ideas can take place at a bar or an auditorium, or in the case of Podcamp in the central idea of a shared brainspace of passionate people mystified by how technology can bring together disparate voices and unify our desire to be heard.

We all want to be heard. Now there's a place where we're listening.

John C. Havens is the About.Com Guide to Podcasting and Founder of Podcast Vision and Voice, a podcast consulting/production firm. He is also one of the primary organizers for PodcampNYC.