Internal conferences occur regularly in organizations. Members of a team—usually one dispersed geographically or among business units—come together for a day or more for presentations, networking and teambuilding. In many ways, these internal conferences aren’t much different than any other conference. Most attendees sit in a room and watch a presentation, either from outside experts or team leaders.

I’ve participated in a few internal conferences in the last few months that ignored the traditional approach, opting instead to put employees at the center of the get-together and encourage higher levels of engagement.

In Prague, members of Deutsche Telekom‘s communication team convened for a best practices review. Marketers and communicators from country operations submitted efforts, with the best selected for presentation. The presenters stayed in a room to present the session multiple times while everyone else rotated through the rooms to catch as many of the presentations as they could.

In Canada, managers working for the City of Mississauga convened for a World Cafe, rotating through three rooms, each of which was dedicated to one of three major themes (communication, innovation and change). A facilitator drove the discussion while participants made notes on paper tablecloths that the next group could see when they rotated into the room.

And last week, some 200 Dell employees whose jobs include social media activities got together for an unconference. The day began with a panel discussion; this was the reason I was there. I was joined by Christopher Barger of General Motors, Kelly Feller from Intel, Chuck Hemann from Weisscomm Group, Katie Paine from KD Paine & Partners, Amber Naslund from Radian6, Andy Sernovitz of the Social Media Business Council and Jordan Williams from REI. Dell’s Richard Binhammer moderated the panel, but all the questions he asked had been submitted in advance by employees participating in the Social Media Community (SMaC) Talk event.

The highlight of the day was the unconference, which worked the same as all such gatherings. There were eight rooms and a couple of tables. Some of the rooms were equipped with digital projectors. A dry mark erase board was divided horizontally into five time slots and vertically by the number of rooms and tables. Employees jotted the topic they wanted discussed onto sheets of paper that they attached to an empty block. As each session began, the participants scanned the topics and chose a room or table. If the conversation wasn’t to their liking, they switched to another session.

The day ended with remarks from CEO Michael Dell, a significant display of support for the company’s social communication and marketing activities from the highest level of leadership.

In each of these three instances, employees walked away far more energized and equipped with ideas and information than I’ve seen from any of the hundred or more traditional internal conferences in which I’ve participated.

Pulling off an event like this requires, more than anything else, trust that employees have better information to share with each other than managers or outside experts can bring to the table. (At Dell’s SMaC Talk event, the involvement of outside experts in the breakouts added dimensions of context and non-Dell examples to the conversations.) If your organization has that level of confidence in your eemployees, it’s worth considering putting the content of your next internal conference in their hands.