Tuesday I will be heading to Boston for the annual fall VON event. The past few shows have been criticized for their migration towards a "carrier" conference, leaving little room for attracting the innovators in the (IP) telecommunications space. As a result Carl Ford, Chief Community Development Officer at PulverMedia, has included an Innovator's Track where the creative talents reign supreme. Intriguing topics to be covered include

• Rapid Development
• VoIP over 3G
• VoIP, Virtualizaton and New Service Creation
• Enterprise 2.x
• Social Networking
• Goin' Mobile with Skype
• iHacks Freeing the iPhone
• Europe Leads the Way
• The Secret Life of HD VoIP

with panelists such as Thomas Howe (aka Mr. Mashup), James Tagg (Truphone), Ben Lilienthal (VAPPS - HighSpeedConferencing), Aswath Rao, Helen Khais (IM+ for Skype), Stephane Marceau (Mobivox), Samuel Li (iSkoot), Jeff Black (Talk Plus) amongst others.

But this was not sufficient so Carl has also worked with Thomas Howe, Alec Saunders and other to create a VONCamp UnConference. I have no experience with Unconferences but in addition to Alec and Thomas both Jon Arnold and Brough Turner have written about it.

The challenge for me is to determine when I should be at the Innovators Track and when at the VONCamp. But to help sort it out:

The Innovators Forum is a series of sessions that show case companies in our more traditional format. However dialogue in these sessions is encouraged. The VONCamp Unconference is harder to describe, because it gives people a chance to self identify as a speaker. ... If you've got something you want to discuss that's outside the formal program, VONCamp Unconference is the place to do it.