Blogging can add buzz to your conference

Blogs and wikis are now an established part of technology conferences like ETCon, with participants posting commentary to their own sites or a common space. But is that realistic for other events? Recently the British Council gave me a chance to find out - and it worked really well thanks to the enthusiasm of a group of international participants. Particularly since for most English was not their first language, and blogging was a new experience. You can see the results here.

The opportunity arose because Kevin Harris, of the Community Development Foundation, asked my colleague Drew Mackie and I run the first session of a four-day seminar in Social Inclusion in the Information Society. Kevin's day job now mainly focusses on Neighbourhoods (blogged here), but for the past 10 years or so he's been one of the key people in community technology policy in the UK. You can find a report of our 'game' session here.
Kevin was running the event for Sarah Metcalfe of the British Council, and I knew the Council had put a lot of effort and funding into a blog for the World Summit on the Information Society - The Daily Summit So why not try and run our own more modest blog at the seminar?
Sarah found some extra budget, and event organiser Sarah Perons made sure the Hilton hotel, Cardiff, had a wireless network running for our laptops, and other facilities.
I loaded all the pre-event biogs and speaker materials on to a blog, and set off for the event with cameras, other kit, and additional tech support in the form of my son Dan. Over the first evening and day we shot, filmed and wrote - then left Kevin, Sarah and the others to carry on blogging for a few days until I returned to do some tidying up and additional content at the end.
Dan concentrated on editing the pictures and Quicktime video - some shot on handheld cameras, some using iRecordNow with an iSight webcam and an iBook. Using a webcam and video capture means you can blog an interview in a couple of minutes.
The whole things was a bit of an experiment, and with more preparation and the experience of this event I'm sure we could do things better another time. My reminder checklist would include:
* More time to put together pre-event material from biogs and speaker notes
* Researching links to other relevant blogs and sites
* A well-lit place to get head shots of all participants, and time to do that well.
* Deciding formats and settings for pictures and video to web, and experimenting with those
* Organising who blogs what
* A session to introduce participants to blogging, with continued support available
* More computers
* More time to do cross links and summarising postings.

There's clearly a lot of scope for making events buzzier, longer lasting - and extending their reach - by adding appropriate technologies - and many examples around of 'smart' computer-assisted meetings. I'll be looking out for examples - and hopefully clients like the British Council prepared to back some innovation.

Update
More items here on blogging
Ross Mayfield quotes Loïc Le Meur to offer the Secret Sauce of the Explosive Cocktail by which blogs and wikis will spice up a conference

Comments

[Andy Carvin]

There were a lot of bloggers at WSIS in December, including DailySummit.net and myself. When I was editor of the Benton Foundation's Communications Related Headlines we ran a blurb about WSIS blogging a few days after the summit:

BLOGGERS CONVERGE ON WORLD SUMMIT
Last week's World Summit on the Information Society was covered by bloggers
from around the world, using articles and streaming media to capture summit
events. DailySummit.net, an online collaboration of British and Arab
journalists, reported on the ins and outs of the summit almost in real time,
with contributors blogging via Wi-Fi-enabled laptops during events and press
conferences. Student journalists from sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile,
contributed articles and streaming video as part of the Highway Africa News
Agency, a project of South Africa Broadcasting Corporation and Rhodes
University. Similarly, OneWorld TV featured a team of young journalists from
South America and Asia who created video diaries for distribution over the
Internet. And Communications-Related Headlines' own Andy Carvin offered his
own perspective on his Waste of Bandwidth blog, covering events and speeches
ranging from Stanford University's Lawrence Lessig and Richard Stallman of
the free software movement to Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and
Iranian President Mohammed Khatami.
Sources: DailySummit, Highway Africa, OneWorld TV, Andy Carvin's Waste of
Bandwidth
http://www.dailysummit.net
http://www.highwayafrica.org.za/hana/
http://tv.oneworld.net/tapestry?cluster=21
http://www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/

Meanwhile, a group of Vermont high school students were invited to the World Social Forum in Mumbai last month, and they published a rather interesting blog during their stay:

http://www.tagstudio.net/mumbai/mt/

I'm personally quite interested in more organized conference blogging experiments - for example, giving presenters and attendees blog space for the course of a meeting, so all of their comments can be organized in a central blog space.... -ac

[Stephen Blyth]

Kia ora
I've often wondered how to walk the talk at technology conferences by actually using Internet based tools to extend and enrich the experience. The British Council weblogging example is useful food for thought. But the question I will always ask is, who actually participates? How do people without confidence or language fluency contribute? Any views based on your recent experiences.
Regards, Stephen

[David Wilcox]

Stephen - I would suggest mixing a range of methods - digital photos, video, audio, text, groups discussions, presentations etc - and let people choose what suits them. They might work in pairs or groups. I haven't done anything that ambitious yet, but it should be feasible with enough preparation and support. Should be fun!
Regards, David

[Andy Carvin]

Hi David,

I just wanted to let you know I've started experimenting with creating RSS feeds/syndications for my discussion groups, DIGITALDIVIDE and WWWEDU. I've been playing around with a variety of methods and I think I've come to a fairly stable solution, at least for the time being. Please feel free to visit my two most recent blog entries to see how it works:

http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/

take care,
andy

[Ross Mayfield]

Thanks for the mention. Our Eventspace service facilitates this kind of event participation: http://www.socialtext.com/products/eventspace/