Enthusiastic Amateurs and Overcoming Institutional Inertia

I was very pleased but also slightly embarrassed when Dave Pattern invited me to speak at the Mashed Library UK 2009 event (also known as ‘Mash Oop North‘). Pleased because this event, which is building on the success of the  first event which took place at Birkbeck College in November 2008, reflects the interests I have in this area and will provide an opportunity to learn from some of the people (such as Tony Hirst, Mike Ellis and Dave Pattern) who are actively engaged in significant development activities. But embarrassed because I’ve been asked to speak to an audience who would, I suspect, prefer to listen to and talk to the gurus of mashup developments!

Dave convinced me, however, that as there appear to be a significant number of participants at the event who don’t regard themselves as mainstream developers, but rather as ‘enthusiastic amateurs’ that there is a role to play in exploring how the learning which will take place at the event can be exploted.

So I will be giving a talk and inviting discussion on the topic of “Enthusiastic Amateurs and Overcoming Institutional Inertia“.  This session will take place on Tuesday 7 July 2009. My slides are embedded below (and are also available on Slideshare). If you have any thoughts on this subject, especially if you regard yourself as an ‘enthusiastic amateur’ yourself I’d welcome your comments. Of you may wish to particuipate in the Twitter back channel, using the hastag “#mashlib09″.

Openness and IWMW 2009

IWMW 2009 Fully Subscribed

Bookings are now closed for this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009), with the event again fully subscribed with 190 participants (the limit imposed by the numbers of bedrooms available and the size of the venue for the reception).

Amplification of IWMW 2009

If you haven’t booked a place but do have an interest in the range of plenary talks which will be given, don’t worry – the event will be ‘amplified’.

This reflects our commitment to openness which I argued the higher educational community should embrace more fully in a recent post on Respect Copyright (and Subvert It!).  In that post I also suggested that we need to be more open about the risks and the approaches taken to managing the risks. So here is a summary of the various approaches we are taken to encouraging openness for the event.

Maximising the Impact of the Plenary Talks

The plenary talks at IWMW 2007 and IWMW 2008 were streamed live and we will be doing the same again this year.

We hope to have an official ‘live-blogger’ who will take responsibility for providing a live summary of the plenary talks. This will be available using the event hashtag #iwmw2009 and may also be aggregated in another environment (such as Coveritlive, use of which has described in a Review of Web2.0 amplification at CILIPS Conference) to allow people to contribute to the discussions if they don’t have a Twitter account.

Due to logistical reasons (only one screen display in the lecture theatre)  we will not be providing a live display of tweets during the talks (which means we aren’t addressing the issue of whether a live display would be valuable or distracting). However we intend to make use of a live Twitter display (a ‘Twitterwall’) during the opening of the event and at other times in order to allow participants to say hello to each other if they are not sat in adjacent seats, an approach I felt worked well at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference.

We will also try to ensure that the speaker’s slides are available on Slideshare so that the remote audience is able to view the slides and the talk simultaneously. We know that speakers sometimes change the slides at the last moment – we’ll try and keep the versions in synch, but can’t guarantee this.

Note we’ll need speaker’s permissions for this – and will respect their (e.g. if their organisation doesn’t allow this; they want the freedom to be more open; etc.).

The Risks

I’ve described what we are planning on doing. But what about the risks of embracing openness more fully at an event?

We will be seeking permission from the speakers for the live streaming of their talks. And we do appreciate that there may be reasons why such permission may not be given (the speaker wishes to be able to speak freely or the speaker’s organisation may not allow this). We also intend to have a Creative Commons notice on the lectern (as we did last year) so that a rights  statement will be embedded in the video. We will allow the speaker to change their mind about making a recording of the talk available after the event (we will clarify this immediately after the talk, so that we do not have to write off time which may be spend on post-processing the video).

We will be providing a ‘quiet zone’ in the lecture theatre for participants who wish to avoid possible distractions caused by live-blogging and who do not wish to be photographed or videoed.  We will also ask other participants to respect the guidelines for this area.

We will, of course, be evaluating the event, including the innovative aspects as well as the mainstream aspects.  As we would like to share the user feedback more widely the evaluation form will state that anonymised comments may be published openly.

We appreciate that amplified conferences are still in their infancy, and there may be a diverse range of expectations from the audience, both local and remote. We are interested in learning from related events, such as Dev8D,  Mashed Library UK 2009 ‘Mash Oop North’, Amplifiedat Nlab 09 day and the Eduserv Symposium.

We’d welcome feedback and suggestions. But, please no suggestions that will take too much time and effort – there’s not much time left!

There Is No Institutional Blueprint for Web 2.0 – So Let’s Develop One

Last week I gave a talk on “The ‘Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World’ Report: Implications For IT Service Departments” to staff in BUCS (the Bath University Computer Services Department.

The following day, as she described in a blog post, Chris Sexton, IT Services Director at the University of Sheffield and UCISA chair, facilitated a similar session on “IT Service 2.0“.

Chris concluded that “There was a general acceptance of the conclusions of the report which was that Universities need to change, and that change will be driven by students and what they will demand“. Such comments could also apply to the discussions at the BUCS seminar. And the reservations which Chris described:

“However, there was some opinion expressed that the report was an exaggeration of the change that web 2.0/social web will make in students. There was also a concern that we could be in the situation of using technology to cut costs – to deliver more with less – to the detriment of what a University education means“.

also reflected some concerns which were aired here at Bath.

Both of these events were  based on the recent report on the recent “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” CLEX report.

One of the points made in the report was the lack of a clear institutional blueprint for action:

Decisions on whether or not to implement Web 2.0 technologies are, however, the responsibility of each institution individually having regard to its particular ethos and circumstances. Here, experience can be shared, but there is no blueprint for action and, indeed, it may not be possible to develop a blueprint in an area that is so highly context specific.

Senior managers in IT Services at the Universities of Bath and Sheffield have started the discussions regarding such an institutional blueprint. I’m also aware of a forthcoming Web Community event at the University of Bradford which will address how the Web can be used to support the University’s mission and objectives.

Is there scope, I wonder, for an event for the community on exploiting the potential of Web 2.0 which could help in the process of developing an institutional blueprint? In November 2006 UKOLN organised an event on “Exploiting the Potential of Wikis” followed a year later by a similar one-day event on “Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks“.

Both of these events, which were fully subscribed, provided an opportunity to explore some of the policy issues associated with provision of or access to wikis, blogs and social networks.

I think we are now in a situation in which we need to address the institutional issues associated with use of services in ‘The Cloud’ (e.g. sustainability, reliability, and legal issues) , the relationships between the bottom-up and personal use of networked services and the institutional provision of such services and the relevance of ‘Social Web’ technologies to support teaching and leaning and research activities within our institutions.

I’ll start exploring the possibilities of organising such an event. I’d welcome suggestions on the topics which should be addressed at such an event and possible speakers.

I’ll conclude by sharing the resources for the talk I gave at Bath. The slides are available on Slideshare (and embedded below) and a video of my talk is available on Vimeo.  In addition local-hosted copies of the resources are also available on the UKOLN Web site.

---

Please note that this post originally had a link to an incorrect version of the slides (a version which had been uploaded to a guest account). The post has been updated with a link to and an embedded versionof the managed resource. However the original version of the slides has not been deleted.

IWMW 2009 Event Open For Bookings

This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2009) is now open for bookings. This year the 3-day event, which is aimed at members of institutional Web management teams and  others with interests in institutional  use of Web services, will be held at the University of Essex, Colchester on 28-30^th July 2009.

Although the event is well-established, having been launched in 1997, the event continues to develop in response to the ever-changing Web environment and the needs and expectations of the Web management community. We will continue to have a number of plenary talks which will provide a shared context for all workshop participants. However this year, in response to feedback we’ve received from previous events, we are splitting the talks (and related workshop sessions) on the second afternoon into two strands: a ‘front-end’ strand which focusses on the services as perceived by the end user and a ‘back-end’ strand which addresses the ‘behind-the-scenes’ activities which are needed in order to deliver the user services.

We will also continue to provide the parallel workshop sessions. These sessions aim to provide all participants with the opportunity to contribute actively to the sessions, rather than simply sit back and listen to talks!

A significant development to the event, which was trialled for the first time last year, are the bar camp sessions. These sessions will be more informal than the workshops, and ideas can be submitted during the event itself. 

Another new development is the developer’s lounge. We will be encouraging active participation from the development community but will let developers provide a structure to how this will develop.

The cost is £350 per person which includes two nights ensuite accommodation (or £300 with no accommodation). The delegate fee includes attendance at the workshop, conference materials, refreshments and lunch, workshop dinner and social events.

We hope to see you in July!

Lessons Learnt from the Amplification of the CILIP2 Event

Reasons for This Post

At last week’s CILIP2 Open Session both Phil Bradley and myself argued that there was a need for the Library community to actively engage with Web 2.0 tools and even be prepared to make mistakes. Without making mistakes, it will not be possible to innovate, we argued. We also felt that we should be open about our mistakes, in order to learn from them and to help others in the sector from repeating such mistakes.

Such views echo the sentiment expressed by Mia Ridge who, in a blog post about the recent Museums and the Web 2009 conference entitled  “Oh noes, a FAIL! Notes from the unconference session on ‘failure’ at MW2009 ” explained her “motivation in suggesting the ['Failure' unconference] session – intelligent, constructive failure is important. Finding ways to create a space for that conversation isn’t something we do well at the moment“.

This post is my attempt at explaining aspects of the ‘amplification’ of the CILIP2 open session which failed or could have been improved, and to identify ways in which the next attempt at amplifying a physical event to a wider remote audience can be improved. (Note the term amplified conference was coined by Lorcan Demsey Dempsey and a summary is provided on Wikipedia).

Things Which Worked

Before describing areas for improvement it is worth summarising the things that worked!

I was pleased that the pre-event publicity of use of Twitter at the event succeeded in attracting large numbers of participants, with some, I think, being willing to subscribe to Twitter and possibly even install a Twitter client in order to participate on the day itself.

The event organisers played their in supporting the amplification of the event. Caroline Moss-Gibbon, who chaired the event, described the live-blogging at the event and asked the participants physically present at the meeting at CILIP Headquarters to regard any comments they made or questions they asked as being in the public domain. The evnt organisers had also arranged for two official bloggers, who would act as public note-keepers at the event, using both a Twitter channel and a CILIP blog post as a means of keeping the remote audience up-to-date with the talks and discussions.

The Twitterfall client which was suggested as a way in which remote participant could keep up-to-date with Twitter posts containing the ‘cilip2′ tag also seemed to prove popular judging from subsequent comments I read of various blog posts. And the goodwill of software developers – in particular Dave Patten – was appreciated by the CILIP community for his transcript of the tweets and his Wordle visualisation of the content of the tweets.

I was also pleased to have recorded a slidecast of a rehearsal of my talk prior to the event. A couple of people commented that they had listened to my talk prior to the event which enabled them to have a feel for the issues I would be raising in my talk.

Areas For Improvement

There are a number of areas in which I felt improvements could have been made. Most of these will not have been apparent to others and so I could feel safe in keeping them to myself. However sharing the experiences with others will remind me to do better next time and will allow others to make additional suggestions.

Reporting:
After the event it was pointed out to me that the description of ‘official’ Twitterers and bloggers at the event could have been interpretted as a way of ensuring that an official party line was documented which censored any criticisms of CILIP.  As Caroline Moss-Gibbons, chair of the CILIP Council, described in her brief report on the session the reporters ”had full editorial freedom of course, no ‘party line’ to follow“. Although Caroline made this point in her introduction to the session, the remote audience would not necessarily have picked up on this.
Lesson: next time I feel it would be helpful to provide a Web page about the amplification of the event which explictly clarifies the autonomy of the reporters.

Lack of audio/video recordings:
I recorded a video of Phil Bradley’s talk at the event using my Nokia N95 mobile phone – but despite having deleted old videos from the memory card the previous day, the phone ran out of memory after only two minutes.  I subsequently discovered that the phone was storing the video on its built-in memory rather than using the 2 Gb memory card.
Lesson: check configuration options on mobile phone to ensure recordings are being made to correct storage device.

I also brought along a digital camera which could take video recordings (and isn’t limited to the 10 minutes of video footage which my personal camera has). I also brought along a tripod to avoid camera shakes. As my intention was to record my own talk I needed a helper to start the recording. Unfortunately no recording was made, possibly because the camera had switched itself off.
Lesson: I need to remember that people who I ask to use my digital devices are unlikely to be familiar with them and there will be a need to provide some training.

Lack of streaming audio/video:
I brought along my Asus EE PC and intended to try out Skype in order to its potential for allowing a remote user to listen in to the two opening talks (and also possibly record the talks). I also brought along a Polycom Communciator device and tested that it worked correctly as a microphone and speaker. Unfortunately although the devices worked correctly I couldn’t connect to the two new Skype contacts who had expressed interest in listening to the talks.  This may have been due to user interface problems on my Linux-based Asus EEE.
Lesson: I need to authenticate remote users in advance, on user interfaces which I am more familiar with.

How Else Could the Event Amplification Have Been Improved?

What else could have been done to enhance the amplification of the event to the remote audience and to people who may have wished to hear the talks and discussions but did not have networked access at the time of the event?

I am aware that James Clay, e-learning resource manager at Gloucestershire College, has been using Qik at various conferences for some time. I did wonder whether a streaming video service such as Qik might have been used by members of the CILIP2 audience with a suitable mobile phoneand a contract which allowed for data to be transmitted within incurring significant charges.  However I suspect that this service is still being used by the early adopters, such as James, and hasn’t yet caught the attention of the early mainstream user community. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for its use at a forthcoming CILIP event?

But if members of the audience did not have a device and contarct which could be use for video streaming, I suspect many of them did have mobile phones which culd be used for sound recordings. SHould we have encouraged the audience to record the talks, I wonder?  Rather than a single centralised approach, which has a single point of failure (as I’ve described above!) possibly we should be adopting a LORKSS approach (Lots of Recording Keep Safe and Secure). Should we be encouraging others to take recording in order to minimise the risks of failures?

Sharing the Rehearsal of my Talk at the CILIP 2 Council Meeting

As I described a couple of day’s ago in a blog post on CILIP2.0 – Open Session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0 myself and Phil Bradley will be giving brief talks about how we feel CILIP should respond to the opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 at a CILIP Council meeting next Wednesday (29^th April 2009).

I have produced the first draft of my slides and I’ll be chatting to Phil how this may fit in with the approach he will be taking. I have also created a ’slidecast’ of the talk, by recording a rehearsal of the talk and synching the audio with a copy of the slide on Slideshare. This will help Phil to gain a better understanding of what I’ll be saying. But I also feel that their can be benefits to be gained by sharing this pre-release verion with a wider audience.  In suitably-configured browsers the slidecast will be embedded below:

I’m well of of some risks in doing this: I feel slightly self-conscious about listening to the sound of my own voice and towards the end of the talk I found myself forgetting what I was intending to say and start stuttering and repeating myself.  If I felt that as a professional all of my outputs mist be of high quality although I might write a script I would leave the reading of it to a trained actor. But this would undermine the key point in my presentation that information professionals (in particular) should be willing to make use of innovative approaches to one’s work, be prepared to make mistakes and learn from them and be prepared to be open with one’s user community in the early stages of development and not just when a service has been finalised.

Making this particular slidecast available can also provide some specific benefits:

• Users can comment on my talk.
• Users can suggest other relevant resources, either by commenting on this blog post on or Slideshare page or by bookmarking resources on del.icio.us using the same tag.
• Anyone who would like to attend the meeting but can’t make it will get a feel for my contribution.
• If I fail to attend the meeting (I’m ill or First Great Western fails to get my to London on time, for example) my slidecast can be used as a replacement.

But before you start listening to the slidecast (which lasts for about 20 minutes) I should say that the talk contains nothing that I haven’t written about in my blog previously. Indeed the talk is very similar to a talks on Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services and A Risks and Opportunities Framework For Library 2.0 which I gave in the Indianapolis last week.

To summarise the key points.

The talk begins by reviewing examples of Library 2.0 approaches, add the University of Wolverhampton and the National Library of Wales.  A description of various barriers which have been identified at various UKOLN workshop for the cultural heritage sector is given. It is acknowledged that there are  legitimate concerns which need to be addressed such as sustainability, interoperability, staff development, cultural barriers, etc. The talk describes a variety of deployment strategies and outlines a risks and opportunities framework for the deployment of Library 2.0 services. The talk suggests how a ‘Critical Friends’ approach (which I will expand on next week) can be used in conjunction with this framework and help to identify possible problem areas. The need to balances such risks with the possible benefits to be gained and the risks of doing nothing – as well as the risks of doing something similar in-house which fails to meet user’s expectations.

The talk concludes by looking at what a professional organisation such as CILIP should be doing for a young librarian (using Jo Alcock as an example) and suggests that thinking about what might be provided in a ‘CILIP 2.0 Manifesto’ could be helpful in furthering the debate.

Your comments are welcomed!

CILIP2.0 – Open Session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0

Phil Bradley and myself have been invited to take part in an open session on CILIP’s use of Web 2.0 (CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals is “the leading professional body for librarians, information specialists and knowledge managers“). This event, which is being referred to as CILIP2.0, will take place at CILIP offices, Ridgmount Street, London from 14.30-16.30 on 29^th April 2009.

The information about the event describes how Phil and myself (well-known ‘gurus’) will be “kicking off the Open Session with presentations about what has worked elsewhere, and the types of things CILIP could try out“. The aim of the session is to generate ideas about how the CILIP Council could be using Web 2.0 to engage better with the library and information community.  These ideas will be fed into CILIP’s Communications Framework which is due to be published in the summer.

The Open Forum was set up following a blog post entitled CILIP – Epic FAIL made by Phil Bradley in response to a post entitled All of a Twitter by Bob McKee, CILIP CEO. I’ll not revisit the different visions of the role of a professional organisation such as CILIP in today’s Web 2.0 environment, but will simply say how pleased I am that CILIP have invited Phil and myself to facilitate a discussion for an audience who will be physically present on the day and a remote audience who may follow the tweets and live blog.

Phil Bradley will probably provide his vision in which information professionals are comfortable in making use of a variety of networked tools and services which are available ‘out there’, and don’t restrict themselves to applications which may be managed in-house. And I intend to explore the risks of this way of working and suggest that, rather than seeking to develop a safe, risk-free environment, information professionals do need to engage with the networked environment that exists today and need to recognise that a failure to take risks can result in a failure to innovate.

I’d be interested in the views of reaers of this blog.  What are your views on how information professionals should engage with a Web 2.0 world and how CILIP should respond?

(TwitterFall) You’re My Wonder Wall

This year’s Museums and the Web conference (MW2009) marked the first occasion I have attended an event during which the Twitter back channel has been embraced by the conference organisers and by many conference participants and not just the usual early adopters.

At last year’s event (MW2008) we saw many developers making use of Twitter, with a display of the tweets about the conference (i.e. tagged with #mw2008) being shown near the registration area. And as a demonstration of the willingness of the conference organisers (David Bearman and Jennifer Trant) to embrace innovation at the conference a live display of the tweets, which were being aggregated by Mike Ellis’s Onetag software, were shown during Clifford Lynch’s closing talk at the conference. I have to admit, though, that there were concerns about this live, unmoderated display of Twitter posts during a talk: what if personal banter were displayed (”anyone fancy going for a drink later?”);  critical comments about the speakers (”this is a boring talk”) or bad language  or even spam from people who weren’t at the conference.

But whilst such concerns may be legitimate, David and Jennifer showed that they were willing to tak and risk and “just do it”. So when the conference delegates arrived at the auditorium for the conference welcome and opening talk we found two computer displays: one of the speaker’s slides and the other a display of Twitter posts tagged with the #mw2009 tag, using the Twitterfall software, 

And judging by comments made on the conference blog, many people found that this live display of tweets in the opening session provided a valuable way of developing a shared sense of community and active participation which continued throughout the conference, with many newcomers subscribing to Twitter, following the more well-established Twitter users and engaging with the discussions themselves.    In fact use of Twitter at the conference was so popular that, during the opening talk, there was a message displayed showing the the #mw2009 tag was ‘trending’ – and was one of the top ten tags used during the day.

Which is not to say that everyone found the Twitterfall display useful: some participants, for example, did find the display distracting. And once the tag was included in the top tags of the day it, perhaps inevitably, attracted the attention of Twitter spammers, with a tweet from ‘PantyGirl’ - and an associated image being included in the live Twitterfall display.

But despite such concerns, others identified some perhaps unexpected benefits of such displays of live tweets. After I published a tweet one person in the audience, with whom I had worked with a few years ago but hadn’t spoke to since, spotted my image in the display and sent me a direct message suggesting that we should meet up. The ability for participants at a large conference to make their prescence known in this way is a benefit which I hadn’t prevviously considered.

Someone else, who hadn’t used Twitter prior to the conference, reflected that in plenary talks people often lose concentration, even if the talks are interesteding (as the opening plenary talk at MW 2009 was). Having additional channels, in which other participants can share their thoughts and provide perhaps different views can help to provide richer insights into the talks.

But what of the dangers that people might make inappropriate comments. Well at MW2009, apart from the PantyGirl spam (which I suspect most people found inoffensive) I feel that the Twittering participants were aware of the issues and avoided tweets which others might have felt inoffensive or inappropriate.

The benefits of the conference Twitter back channel were also officially recognised in the firanl session at the conference when Jon Pratty provided prizes for the MW2009 Backchannel Stars for Saturday. And I was pleased to be the first in the list of prize-winners for my two tweets:

briankelly Due to lack of unions in museums sector @jtrant& David Bearman have got us working at #mw2009 on a Saturday. Capitalist oppressors.

briankelly: @bsletten is right – photo at http://tinyurl.com/3aessg (expand) could be me. Waiting for groupies to arrive at #mw2009

But what of next year? Clearly many particioants found the Twitter wall display useful, with one participant commenting that  ”based on how well tweets were working @ mw2009 I set up a twitter account for our staff intranet. Public site next? #mw2009“. But this wasn’t true for everyone.  Should this be managed by better use of the physical space, I wonder – perhaps suggesting that those who don’t wish to be distributed by the visual intrusion should sit on one side of the lecture theatre?  Or perhaps, with the growing popularity of iPhones and iPod Touches participants should  simply view the communal wall on their own mobile device?

Contrasting Visions of the Library of the Future

My Views From 2001

I was invited to take part in a panel session at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference way back in 2001. Myself and my fellow panellists (Greg Notess and Mary Peterson) had encountered a number of bland panel sessions at previous conferences in which panelists uttered trite sentiments which nobody could possibly disagree with (yes, user testing is a good thing and so is accessibility and quality information). We decided to  avoid falling into this trap and I found myself in the position of having to respond to Greg and Mary’s views of the key role the library sector had in supporting use of networked services and supporting users in a networked environment. I suggested that librarians were just another group of users who had nothing special to add to the development of innovative networked services and, indeed, could inhibit development by seeking to take inappropriate methodologies to the Web environment. Now although these remarks were somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it would be interesting to see how they may relate to today’s networked environment, 8 years later.

The Darien Manifesto

The authors of the Darien Manifesto (John Blyberg, Kathryn Greenhill and Cindi Trainor) have no doubts regarding the importance of librarians, with a manifesto which begins by giving their view that “the purpose of the Library is to preserve the integrity of civilization“. And this “purpose of the Library will never change“! Whilst a number of people have expressed concern over this monolithic description of The Library, and pointed out the unease we would feel if other bodies made similar statements (”The purpose of the government/the police/the Freemasons is to preserve the integrity of civilization and this purpose will never change“) other comments do appear to more accurately reflect the role of libraries  (”provides the opportunity for personal enlightenment“; “encourages the love of learning” and “empowers people to fulfill their civic duty“) and librarians (”select, organize and facilitate creation of content” and “connect people with accurate information“), various commentators, including the Annoyed Librarian, are questioning the manifesto.

The Researcher’s Perspective

Here in the UK a debate is taken place on the Libraries of the Future which is being led by the JISC. At a recent debate on Libraries of the Future Professor Peter Murray-Rust gave his thoughts on what he expects from an academic library from a research/scientific perspective.

Peter’s views had been outlined in a series of blog posts prior to the debate (Peter was living his open vision and encouraged those interested in helping to shape a vision to engage with the ideas he was developing in his blog).

As described by Professor Bruce Royan in a report on the event, Peter’s views challenged current orthodox thinking regarding the libraries’ relevance in a networked world:

“The Librarians of the future will not emerge from the Libraries of today. The researchers of the future won’t want journals, they’ll want little bits of lots of papers, and they won’t respect faculty or subject boundaries, as their work will be interdisciplinary. If they need an information service, they’ll JUST DO IT for themselves“

What Does The Future Hold?

The official blog for the debate provided a summary of Peter’s talk which began:

What is happening in the world is bypassing university libraries.  I talk to colleagues and the feeling is that libraries for STM (science, technical, medical) are not useful. That’s not my polemic view – that’s reporting on having spoken to people.

Will librarians have a significant role to play in the academic library of the future (the future of public libraries, whilst important, was not touched on in Peter’s presentation)? And is Peter’s assertion and question in a recent blog post: “Wikipedia has won – how can we convince you?” further evidence that the librarians who warn their users against such popular Web 2.0 services are becoming marginalised?

But maybe the Dryberg Darien manifesto does contain elements which reflect Peter’s views:

• Adopt technology that keeps data open and free, abandon technology that does not.
• Be willing and have the expertise to make frequent radical changes.
• Hire the best people and let them do their job; remove staff who cannot or will not.
• Trust each other and trust the users.

Perhaps Peter would endorse the third bullet point which calls for staff who aren’t prepared to adapt to a changing environment to be sacked. And there was me thinking that the manifesto simply endorsed woolly liberal values!

Crowd-sourcing Ideas for IWMW 2009

In a trip report on the Institutional Web Managers Workshop 2008 Andy Stewart was full of praise for the event: “it was absolutely fantastic“. Andy went on to say that although “The plenaries, parallel sessions, discussion groups and social events are all extremely useful in their own right” for him “it’s the inspiration and sense of belonging that one feels during and after the conference I think makes the difference“.

We’re currently inviting proposals for this year’s event, IWMW 2009, which will be held at the University of Essex on 28-30^th July 2009. Last year we providing an innovation competition and encouraged developers to make use of the data provided by the university of Aberdeen, Bath and Edge Hill University. This encouragement for openness within the community was welcomed by Andy:

“One theme which stuck out above all, to me, was that of transparency through initiatives to open up our information allowing others to do what they feel with it“.

We are looking to build on this culture of openness. So this year rather than simply inviting submissions for talks and workshop sessions to be sent to the chair of the event (my colleague Marieke Guy) we are using the Ideascale service in order to crowd-source suggestions for content at the workshop.
We’re doing this to allow potential participants and other interested parties to provide suggestions on topics they’ve like to see covered at the address (as well as provide other more general suggests for the event – such as what type of social event we should provide). Doing this in this open fashion, as illustrated below, enables participants to become more active participants in the processes of putting together the programme for the event.

Now we have to be honest and admit that we can’t guarantee that the most popular options will necessarily be provided or that seemingly unpopular topics won’t be covered. But at least everybody will have had the opportunity to participate in this process. And this is also a learning process for ourselves – in retrospect we realise that the suggested titles should have been neutral in tone, rather than the provocative title which could be suited for a session itself (we don’t know if people are voting on the sentiment expressed in the title or on whether the topic should be addressed at the workshop).

And I’m not sure what the usage statistics are meant to be saying. It doesn’t seem likely that 16 users have cast 1018 votes!

But if you have views on topics which members of institutional Web management teams should be discussing feel free to provude your suggestion. Now this won’t be regarded as a submission to the event, but if you would like to give a talk or run a session at this year’s event details of how to submit proposals are available on the IWMW 2009 Web site.

What Can We Learn From The eduWeb Conference?

Background to IWMW

The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) series was launched in July 1997 and has been held every year since, with the 3 day format being used since 1998. This event is aimed at members of institutional Web management teams and has been attracting an audience of 150-200 for some time now.

The eduWeb Conference

But what, I’ve wondered, is the equivalent in the US?  I recently came across the eduWeb conference Web site, which appears to be similar to IWMW. Reading the history of the eduWeb conference page I find that the original conference started in 2000 although it previously had a different name and location. The event, which is privately owned, was relaunched in 2005.  I found it interesting to read about how it perceives its target audiences:

“The conference continues to focus on “both sides f the fence” (front end and back end) regarding a website’s development.

• The “front end” includes marketing, communications, advancement, admissions – it includes any non-IT office that now has a website and knows that part of its strategy is to communicate to internal and external audiences.

• The “back end” includes information technology, database development, applications, instructional design, mobile technology, RSS and more.

The core to having a conference like this was to bring these sides together…to learn from the other side, to learn to talk each other’s language and hopefully bring a better working relationship among the personnel that now create the Web.“

It was also interesting to view the call for papers, which has three strands: (1) Marketing Communications; (2) Design & Development and (3) a Guest Track on Getting It Done!. An accompanying page provides suggestions for possible topics. A draft timetable is also available which, although it doesn’t yet provide details of the individual sessions,  does show how the conference is themed into the three strands.

Comparisons

The IWMW event, like eduWeb, has sought to engage with the marketing, design and management communities as well as those involvement in development work.   And I have to admit that I find eduWeb’s terms ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ quite useful – although I’m unsure how those involved in RSS, XML and other TLA and XTLA work will take to the ‘back end’ term. I wonder if developers in the UK, with the pantomime tradition which is probably not significant in the US (”oh no it’s not”),  would resent being relegated to the back end of the pantomime horse?

Unlike eduWeb, plenary talks at IWMW are intended for all participants. We have wondered whether we should provide streamed plenary talks, but feel that having a small number of plenary talks (ideally by charismatic speakers, such as Ewan Mcinosh’s closing talk at IWMW 2008) can provide a unifying theme which we can all talk about during the conference and afterwards. But is it time for a change?

As all twelve IWMW events have been organised by UKOLN with myself, initially and my colleague Marieke Guy having responsibility for the events, we have been able to ensure continuity of access to the event Web sites.  This enables myself and Marieke to be able to review the content over the years and to  spot trends and themes – and as this Web site are publicly available, others can do the same.  In the past few years we have also provided RSS feeds for various data sources, which enables us to, for example, provide a Google Map of the locationof the events and locations of the plenary speakers.

Trying to find out what had happened at previous eduWeb conferences has proved somewhat difficult. The best I could find were the Google results for searches for “eduWeb 2008“, “eduWeb 2007“, etc. which typically take me to individual blog posts about the event. I could find an official Web site or even a page which aggregates content from blogs of the event.

In the bar at the recent dev8D event I did, however, learn that a number of developers from the UK repository community had attended the eduWeb 2008 event. The developers, who attended several events in the US thanks to funding from the JISC CRIG project, have provided a video in which Dave Flanders (who, despite his American accent is based at Bloomsbury Colleges consortium and will shortly be starting work at the JISC) describes how the University of Chicago winning web site could be made even more effective. As described in the accompanying description of the video:

The EduWeb Awards had the University of Chicago as the winning web site (CMS). It was acclaimed for its minamalistic design, but we thought it could even take it a step further by utilising the Google minamalist search approach. We also thought it might be worth looking into Google SiteMaps to provide a common way of presenting University web sites to the user which could be optimised via the kinds of searches that took place on the local search engine.Point being that better search facilities (analytics) should be put into the institutional search engine so as to guarantee that the user is getting back what they want

It seems that valuable links have already been established with eduWeb. What other links could be made, I wonder? And has anyone attended both the eduWeb and IWMW events? If so, it would be useful to hear about the similarities, differences and things we can learn from each other.

Note that eduWeb 2009 will be held in Chicago on 20-23 July and IWMW 2009 in the University of Essex on the following week (28-30 July). An enthusiastic University Web developer could therefore attend both!

Designing for Disability Seminar

The Designing for Disability

A recent blog post by Neil Witt on The VC’s New VLE inspired me to provide a new introduction to a talk I gave at the “Designing for Disability” seminar held on  Friday 5^th December 2008 at the British Museum.

I was an invited speaker at this event was organised by the Museums Association and the Jodi Awards. The title of my talk, the final talk of the day, was “Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility“.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Let me tell you the tale, I began, of the benevolent emperor. He was kind and wished to do his best for his subjects.  So when he was told of a secret formulae produced by a wizard from a far-off land which would ensure that all of the subjects of his empire would be able to access all of his edicts, he wanted to know more. He was told that the secret formulae would ensure that the blind, the handicapped and the crippled of his land (this story, I should add, took place long ago, when,sadly, such politically incorrect words were the norm) were would all be able to read his edicts. “This sounds truly wonderful” the emperor announced (thinking that it would also be good if they could also read about the new taxes he intended to implement – for even in fairy tales, there is a need for financial prudence and long term sustainability).

And so the emperor announced that henceforth all official pronouncements, all new laws, all new taxes must comply with the WAI way (as the magic new approach became known. And so the lord chief justice issued the proclamation and the Knights of the Accessible Table rode through the kingdom to ensure that the magic was being used everywhere.  “Anyone for fails to comply with the magic will be banished“, it was announced.

Life was good, in the land. And when one of the knights who was made blind in a battle complained that he could read the edicts but couldn’t understand them, he was ignored. And when rumours appeared that there were places in the far-flung regions of the empire where the magic wasn’t being used, but people could still read the emperor’s edicts, this was dismissed.

“But it’s true!” said a little boy.  “There’s a new magic, that’s even better. It’s not the WAI way magic, it’s called ‘Inclusive design“.

And in my talk I described the story which the little boy told.

And this story is true, dear friends. For I was that little boy – and so, too, were David Sloan, Liddy Nevile, Jane Seale, EA Draffan, Helen Petrie, Caro Howell, Lawrie Phipps, Andy Heath, Hamilton Fraser, Elaine Swift and many others. For that little boy was a member of the Knights Who Gathered Evidence. And here is the tale I told, which is available on Google Video and Zentation and is also embedded below (note video was added on 9^th December 2008, after the post was originally published).

Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility 52:16 Talk on ‘Holistic Approaches To Web Accessibility’

The Evidence From The Day

This tale introduced the talk I gave, in which I summarised the various peer0reviewed papers I’ve contributed to since 2004. I described the limitation of the WAI model and the WCAG guidelines, the evidence from a number of Web accessibility surveys which demonstrates that conforming with the guidelines does not necessarily provide accessible Web services and Web services which do not conform to the guidelines have been found to be very accessible.   I went on to describe some of the challenges to be faced in understanding what accessibility means in the context of learning and cultural appreciation.

I was particularly pleased that the holistic approach to Web accessibility which I described seemed to apply so closely to the various case studies which were described during the day.This included:

• Andy Minnion’s talk on “New Media for Access and Participation by People with Learning Disabilities“. He concluded that universal access with a single interface and minor changes of style and appearance do not meet the needs of this group. Content itself needs to be adapted and technical compliance, while important for other groups, is not in itserlf and accessibility solution.
• Linda Ellis’s talk on the use of  British Sign Language video guides to improve access for deaf visitors to Bantock House and Park. She argued that content aimed specifically for Deaf visitors was needed and that, as BSL is a language in its own right, information provided in BSL is needed, since Deaf visitors may find it difficult to understand information provided in English.
• Andrew Payne, The National Archives, on a project to maximise access to the Prisoner 4099 archives. Andrew mentioned how “Flash can be accessible, but you need to be careful”. Based on experiences such as this Andrew concluded by suggest that we “Don’t believe the box tickers”.

I very much agree with Andrew – don’t believe the box tickers. And don’t believe anyone who suggests there’s a simple solution to difficult and complex challenges – whether they be wicked elves or government policy makers!

Pinky and Perky and Swedish Topless Model Caught in Use as Learning Objects

I introduced Pinky and Perky in a recent blog post and I used them when I presented my paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference. And recently I used the dancing and singing pigs from the days of my youth when I gave the final invited plenary talk on “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0” at the “Nordlib 2.0 – Get Inspired by Web 2.0 for Libraries” conference held in Stockholm.

In Stockholm I used the video clip to illustrate how the dangers of an over-managed approach to popular culture wasn’t introduced in the Web era – Pinky and Perky were banned from the BBC in 1996: there was a general election about to be held and I assume the BBC were concerned about “pinko lefty” sentiments which they might try to influence young and impressionable minds (after all, where do you think the term pinko came from :-). This reference is available 47 minutes into the presentation (see Google Video or the Zentation link- where its synched to the slide on “Inappropriate Content“).

On the day before the conference I visited the Nordiska Museum where I saw a cigarette case (I think it was - I couldn’t read the Swedish description) which featured a topless model – from the 17^th or 18^th century. Again I felt that this provided a useful example I could use at the conference to illustrate my point that use of new technologies for ‘pornography’ is nothing new.

Now these two examples meant something to me and where likely to be new to the audience, thus avoiding reuse of cliched presentational devices. In the talk in Stockholm I also updated my slides a hour or so before delivering the talk, using a tweet and subsequent blog post from Karen Blakeman in which she commented that PageFlakes had added advertisments on its Web site overnight, without prior notice. “How would you respond if that happened to a Web 2.0 service you used in your organisation?” I asked the audience.

Non of these example made use of learning resources from a learning object repository. And for the objects I used (a YouTube video of Pinky and Perky, a photograph I had taken in a local museum and an interesting discussion point I’d came across a few hours previously) it would make little sense for me to deposit for reuse by others. Their value, I feel, comes from their relevance to me and my style of presentation, their (regional) links with the place I’m talking at and their timeliness. In fact I also made use of a Barack Obama image and the “Yes we can” slogan which again will time out very quickly.

Do we need repositories for learning objects, I might ask. Or are such repositories for the chore presentations (yet another talk on the same old subject to a large group of undergraduates), which won’t be used by speakers who want to provide fresh and relevant talks? On the other hand, perhaps this is mere indulgencies on the part of the speaker. After all, will a group of Nordic librarians ‘get’ Pinky and Perky?  Mm, maybe I should have used the Swedish chef from the Muppets? or Abba, perhaps, if I want to go for the more popular British stereotypes of Swedish culture?

Realising The Potential of Web 2.0

Earlier this year the JISC launched a debate of Libraries of the Future. UKOLN recently contributed to this debate by sponsoring the Mashed Library event which was facilitated by Owen Stephens, Imperial College.  My contribution has been in exploring best practices for exploiting the potential of Library 2.0. I presented a paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference on “Libraries in the 2.0 Age and Beyond” held at the National Library of Singapore and gave an updated version of the talk at the Nordlib 2.0 conference on “Nordlib 2.0 – Get Inspired by Web 2.0 for Libraries” held at Aula Magna, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden on 21^st November 2008.

It was a privilege to be asked to give the final talk at the conference, and to have a full hour to describe my thoughts on how libraries should go about “Realising The Potential of Web 2.0“.

The conference blog provides more information about the conference and the talks which were given. The talks were streamed live and the videos are currently being edited and will be uploaded shortly. In addition I used a Flip camera to record my own talk and this is available on Google Video (and Blip.tv) and embedded below.

In addition I have used Zentation to synch the video with the PowerPoint slides, as illustrated below. The slides are also available on Slideshare.

Realising The Potential of Web 2.0 59:32 Talk on Realising The Potential of Web 2.0

I hope these different versions of the talk are useful. But if I was to provide only one version of the talk what, I wonder, should it be. The PowerPoint file on the UKOLN Web site, the HTML equivalent, the Slideshare manifestation (with the ability to be embedded elsewhere), the original .AVI file (warning, large file), the Google Video or Blip.TV video of the talk or the synched version of the talk and the slides on Zentation? And is the provision of a variety of versions a sensible precaution at a time when the sustainability of Web 2.0 may be questionable or confusing to the end user?

You Talk At Conferences? That Must Be Scary!

My recent talk on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference held in Singapore on 16-17th October (which was possibly the first Library 2.0 conference in Asia) brought back memories of the first time I spoke at a conference – the INET 94/JENC5 conference held in June 1994 in Prague in which I presented a paper entitled “Becoming an information provider on the WWW“.

I can recall how nervous I felt when I submitted my first paper to an international conference and wondered how I would cope with having to go onto a big stage (I later discovered that the auditorium held 1,000 people). While I was waiting to hear if the paper had been accepted I went on holiday to Victoria Falls. And wile I was there I decided to take a trip white-water rafting. After all, I convinced myself, if I can do this, I can do anything, including giving a paper at an international conference. So I did the trip – and even afterwards booked to go bunjee-jumping off the Victoria Falls Bridge (I was told it was the world’s highest commercial bunjee jump). However the jump were cancelled on the day due to bad weather, so I had to console myself with the fact that I had been white-water rafting down the mighty Zambesi. I went on to present my paper at the conference, and have subsequently spoken at international conferences held in France, Portugal, Hungary, USA, Canada, Japan, Taiwan and, most recently, Singapore. And all thanks to overcoming my nerves by going white-water rafting! (Although knowing bit about the Web probably helped too :-).

These thoughts came back to me after I’d given my talk at the Bridging Worlds conference. As I mentioned the talk was entitled “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends” and in order to demonstrate an approach I take in balancing risks and benefits I described how the slides for the talk were available online with a Creative Commons licence. I also explained that I was happy for my talk to be recorded or broadcast or for the talk to be blogged live – and described that I was using a Flip video camera to record my talk, and would subsequently make this available on Google Video. I explained the reasons I was doing this. I was aware of possible risks – I might make mistakes in my talk which would be preserved for other to see, for example. However I also explained the benefits of doing this – I was speaking at the conference as I had a message I wanted to communicate, and I wanted to maximise the impact of the message and the audience – and I felt that this could be helped by the ‘amplification’ of my talk using a variety of networked technologies.

And it seems that this explanation was appreciated, with Ivan Chew (ramblinglib on Twitter) and a fellow speaker at the conference commenting:

“Brilliant: your explanation of how you weighed the risks Vs benefits of allowing others to vid/ blog/ record your talk“

Ivan went on to further summarise my talk in a subseqent blog post.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that many speakers do take risks when they give presentations – and that this comes with the territory. And participating in amplified conferences can then be seen as a natural extension of the risk-taking and not being fashionable or being rude.

Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends

I’m attending the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference  this week which will be held in Singapore on 16-17 October. I’ve been invited to present a paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends“.

There are a number of interesting speakers at the conference. I’m particularly looking forward to meeting up with Jenny Levine again and hearing her talk on “Librarian 2.0 – New Breed or Just Another Day at the Office?“, meeting my former colleague Bernadette Daly Swanson and hearing what she has to say on “I am Library: Exploring the Library Experience in Second Life” and chatting to Peter Godwin, co-editor of a book on “Information Literacy meets Library 2.0” which I contributed a chapter to earlier this year.

As a blog post on the conference Web site describe, the conference will “try to give .. an insight into what for many is the unfamiliar world of Library 2.0 … [including] Second Life, Folksonomies and new approaches libraries, sharing and  community“. The blog post goes on to suggest that the Library 2.0 Meme Map available on Flickr with a Creative Commons licence, provides a useful insight into the topics which will be covered at the conference.

My paper will provide examples of ways in which Library 2.0 services are being deployed, with brief case studies provided by co-authors Paul Bevan, Jo Alcock and Richard Akerman on uses at the National Library of Wales, University of Wolverhampton and NRC-CISTI, Canada. The main focus of the paper, however focusses on ways of addressing the risks associated with use of externally-hosted services and user-generated content, with a section on the Childnet International and Digizen work being provided by Josie Fraser. 

And after the conference finishes I’m looking forward to taking a well-deserved holiday!

Serious Thinking at Bathcamp08

On Saturday (13 September 2008) I attended my first Barcamp – the Bathcamp08 event held at Invention Studios in Bath. I was present at the conception of this event, in a cafe in Montreal where Mike Ellis floated the idea and explored possible themes with myself, Mia Ridge and Frankie Roberto on the day after the end of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference.  It was initially suggested that the Barcamp should have a focus on the role of IT and the Web in cultural heritage organisations. However during the planning for the event is seems that this suggestion was dropped and the event didn’t have a particular single theme to it.  What it did have, though, was a lot of enthusiasm and friendly vibes across a more diverse set of participants than I normally encounter, with free-lance software developers, people working in small Web development companies and from Web design and marketing agencies, developers from large companies as well as a handful from the academic and cultural heritage sectors.

As the attendees were mostly very active users of various Web 2.0 technologies and services much of the discussions, comments and reflections of the event took place on Twitter using the ‘bathcamp08′ tag, with photos being uploaded to Flickr and slides to Slideshare using this tag and other resources, including blog posts about the event, should be available using this tag. There is also a Bathcamp08 Pageflakes page which aggregates the various RSS feeds associated with the event. And finally I should mention that there are a number of video recordings of the event available, including MIke Ellis’s introduction to Bathcamp08.

With so many other comments about the event likely to be published soon I’ll not attempt to summarise the event, except to thank Mike Ellis (in particular) and the other organisers of the event (including Tim Beadle, Frankie Roberto, Matt Jukes and Mike’s Eduserv colleagues) for ensuring the event was such a success.

The Barcamp rules expect first-timers to participate actively at the event, and not just be passive lurkers. I had floated the idea of a double-act with Dave Briggs (whom I’ve not met but have had a couple of Twitter conversations with) on the use of Web 2.0 in public sector organisations, with a focus on the barriers rather than the potential barriers. However Dave couldn’t make the event, which meant some last minute updating of my slides for my 40 minute session, which I decided to call “Web 2.0: Time For Serious Thinking!” – a reference to a talk Mike Ellis and myself gave at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference on “Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing”.

My slides are available on Slideshare and are also embedded below.

As the Bathcamp was an informal and friendly event I had the opportunity to be sceptical about our previous paper, using the example of the enthusiastic Web 2.0 developer (which I called an ‘Ellis‘) who has a valuable role to play in the early stages of a new technology in getting the involvement of other developers and early adopters. However once the initial period of excitement has died down, there’s a need for the more serious thinking to take place.  This will include the need to address the various barriers to the use of Web 2.0 which I have encountered in recent workshop, including, most recently, the Sharing Made Simple: An Introduction to the Social Web workshop I facilitated for organisations in the cultural heritage sector in Wales. As documented on the event wikithe barriers for museums, libraries and archives include:

Corporate Depts (eg IT, Corporate Image etc)- need to get political partners on board to apply pressure via SMT

Need for Higher Level Education- fear of impacts of negative return from Web 2.0 – “it’s chaos”. Especially at SnrManager level. Need for realistic risk management.

Computer Literacy (public) – would we be excluding a generation who don’t use this tech but visual content can be more appealing to those with poor literacy.

Training/ Staff Knowledge – How do we get people’s knowledge and skills up to scratch?

Time – How do we resource this work? Who has the time?

Evaluation- how do you evaluate this work as being worthwhile? How do we get our paymasters to say that these are OK in terms of our KPIs?

Legislation & Procedures - DDA, DPA etc

Sustainability – of Software and activity. How do you work with services with which you have no SLA? How do you make sure this continues in the long term? Who might support us?

Choosing Software – how do we select the right product?

Duplication of Effort (eg. with Corporate Website) – is this a waste of time? Will it be contradictory?

Getting People to Use It - If we build it, will they come? What’s a ‘good’ level to judge ourselves against?

Abuse & Bad Publicity – How do we deal with this? What if it all goes wrong and gets in the papers? Could I lose my job?

Cost – Who pays? How?

Anyone have any suggestions as to how these barriers can be addressed? Or even comments as to whether these barriers are real?

Defining An “Amplified Conference”

The term ‘amplified conference’ was, I believe coined in a blog post by Lorcan Dempsey in which he observed that ” It is interesting to watch how more conferences are amplifying their effect through a variety of network tools and collateral communication“.

It will be noted that Lorcan didn’t seek to define what he meant by the term, but was merely observing a pattern of uses of networked technologies at events being made, in Lorcan’s example, at a number of JISC events, although such uses predate this as I described in a paper on “Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences” published in June 2005.

But we don’t seem to have an agreed definition of the term. And this can be problematic, especially if we decide that we want to host an ‘amplified conference’.

So I thought I’d set the ball rolling by describing what I mean by an amplified conference.

---

The term amplified conference describes a conference or similar event in which the talks and discussions at the conference are ‘amplified’ through use of networked technologies in order to extend the reach of the conference deliberations.

The term is not a prescriptive one, but rather describes a pattern of behaviors which initially took place at IT and Web-oriented conferences once WiFi networks started to become available at conference venues and delegates started to bring with them networked devices such as laptops and, more recently, PDAs and mobile phones.

We can observe a number of ways in which conferences can be amplified through use of networked technologies:

Amplification of the audiences’ voice: Prior to the availability of real time chat technologies at events (whether use of IRC, Twitter, instant messaging clients, etc.) it was only feasible to discuss talks with immediate neighbours, and even then this may be considered rude.

Amplification of the speaker’s talk: The availability of video and audio-conferencing technologies make it possible for a speaker to be heard by an audience which isn’t physically present at the conference. Although use of video technologies has been available to support conferences for some time, this has normally been expensive and require use of dedicated video-conferencing tecnologies. However the availability of of lightweight desktop tools make it much easier to deploy such technologies, without even, requiring the involvement of conference organisers.

Amplification across time: Video and audio technologies can also be used to allow a speaker’s talk to be made available after the event, with use of podcasting or videocasting technologies allowing the talks to be easily syndicated to mobile devices as well as accessed on desktop computers.

Amplification of the speaker’s slides: The popularity of global repository services for slides, such as Slideshare, enable the slies used by a speaker to be more easily found, embedded on other Web sites and commented upon, in ways that were not possible when the slides, if made available at all, were only available on a conference Web site.

Amplification of feedback to the speaker: Micro-blogging technologies, such as Twitter, are being used not only as a discussion channel for conference participants but also as a way of providing real-time feedback to a speaker during a talk. We are also now seeing dedicated microblogging technologies, such as Coveritlive and Scribblelive, being developed which aim to provide more sophisticated ‘back channels’ for use at conferences.

Amplification of a conference’s collective memory: The popularity of digital cameras and the photographic capabilities of many mobile phones is leading to many photographs being taken at conferences. With such photographs often being uploaded to popular photographic sharing services, such as Flickr, and such collections being made more easy to discovered through agreed use of tags, we are seeing amplification of the memories of an event though the sharing of such resources. The ability of such photographic resources to be ‘mashed up’ with, say, accompanying music, can similarly help to enrich such collective experiences (such as the Animoto clips of IWMW 2007 and UKOLN’s Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks Workshop).

Amplification of the learning: The ability to be able to follow links to resources and discuss the points made by a speaker during a talk can enrich the learning which takes place at an event, as described by Shabajee’s article on “‘Hot’ or Not? Welcome to real-time peer review” published in the Times Higher Educational Supplement in May 2003.

Long term amplification of conference outputs: The availability in a digital format of conference resources, including ‘official’ resources such as  slides,  video and audio recordings, etc. which have been made by the conference organisers with the approval of speakers, together with more nebulous resources such as archives of conference back channels, and photographs and unofficial recordings taken at the event may help to provide a more authentic record of an event, which could potentially provide a valuable historical record.

Well that’s my initial attempt at trying to define what I understand by the term ‘amplified conference’.   I should add that in this post I’m not discussing any of the  limitations of amplified conferences (which I’ve commented on previously). My final comment is to point out that I actually organise ‘amplified workshops’ and ‘amplified seminars’ but neither of these terms seem to have the resonance of ‘amplified conference’.  So I suspect we should probably stick with this term to refer to a range of events.

Does this definition work for you?

The ILI Tenth Anniversary

The Internet Librarian International Conference Is Ten

This year sees the 10^th anniversary of the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference. This year’s event, ILI 2008, will be held at Novotel London West, London, UK on 16-17^th October 2008. And, unfortunately, it will be the first ILI conference I won’t be able to attend. I have spoken at all of the ILI conferences and have also been a member of the programme committee and chaired sessions for a number of years.

My Involvement In ILI Conferences

Details of all of my talks at ILI are available on the UKOLN Web site. In light of the forthcoming anniversary I thought it would be interesting to produce a timeline of my involvement with the conference. I used the Dipity software to produce the timeline of my involvement in the ILI conference series, as illustrated below (and I should add that an embedded version of this is available on the UKOLN Web site, which also provides access to a locally managed copy of the data, so that potentially the service can be recreated if the Dipity service is not sustainable).

The conference has been of particular relevance to UKOLN, as it has provided an opportunity to actively engage with the communities served by both of our core funders: the academic libraries and the JISC development community together with those working in public libraries. Producing this timeline has provided a useful opportunity to observe and reflect the topics which have been of interest to these communities over this time.

Talks On Web Standards

My first talk was entitled “New Standards on the Web” and I described emerging new Web standards, including a range of XML standards (XLink and XPointer) and RDF. Looking back at the presentation (and the references to related work such as Eric Miller slide’s on support for RDF in Netscape) I can see how naive I as in my expectation that the emerging new W3C standards would be quickly deployed in a mainstream service environment. I gave another talk on standards at ILI 2003 entitled “HTML Is Dead! A Web Standards Update” in which I avoided the complexities of Semantic Web standards and focussed on data formats including SVG and SMIL. Again I was soon able to appreciate that the market place had little interest in these standards, although my comments on the importance of and XML and CSS, for example, were appropriate and timely. The final talk I gave related to Web standards was given at ILI 2005 and was entitled “Facing The Challenges Of A Standards-Based Approach To Web Development“. Here I reflected on the failure of various Web standards to gain acceptance in the marketplace and described the ‘contextual approach to use of open standards’ which I had been involved in developed for the JISC to help avoid repeating the costly mistakes made in the past when open standards (e.g. Coloured Book software) had continued to be advocated even after their failures had been widely acknowledged.

Web Accessibility

A talk on “Benchmarking Of Library Web Sites” given at ILI 2002 included a description of use of automated Web accessibility testing tools. The following year, at ILI 2003, I took part in a Web accessibility panel session entitled “Web Site Accessibility: Too Difficult To Implement?” and this time I gave one of my first presentations in which I argued that the traditional approaches to providing accessible Web resources, based on implementation of WCAG guidelines, was flawed. Two years later the joint UKOLN/Techdis holistic approach to Web accessibility had been developed and at ILI 2005 I was able to run a half day workshop with Lawrie Phipps on “A Holistic Approach To Web Usability, Accessibility And Interoperability“.

Best Practices For Publishing E-Journals

ILI conferences have provided a dissemination opportunity for various projects I have been involved in. I gave a talk on “Electronic Magazines: Issues in Implementation” at ILI 2000 which described the EU-funded Exploit Interactive e-journal. The following year, at ILI 2001, Marieke Guy and myself ran a half-day workshop session on “Publishing Web Magazines, e-Journals & Webzines“, the first of four workshop sessions I have facilitated at ILI conferences.

Other Areas

Other topics which I’ve covered at ILI conferences have included advertising on Web sites (at ILI 2001), new devices on the Web (ILI 2002) and quality assurance for Web sites (a half day workshop at ILI 2004).

Web 2.0

Since ILI 2004 the main focus of my involvement at ILI has been related to Web 2.0. The first talk was entitled “Beyond E-mail! Wikis, Blogs and Social Networking Software“, with a talk on “The Sceptics View Of New Technologies” being given in a panel session at the ILI 2004 event.

A talk on “Email Must Die!” at ILI 2005 described the benefits of various Web-based collaborative and communications tools, and, at the same event I continued to argue the need to adopt a critical approach to the new technologies with a talk on “Folksonomies – The Sceptics View“.

I was invited to chair a session on Wikis at ILI 2006 and, due to the late unavailability of one of the invited speakers, also gave a brief talk on “Reflections On Personal Experiences In Using Wikis“. My main talk that year was on “Web 2.0 and Library 2.0: Addressing Institutional Barriers“.

Finally at ILI 2007 Kara Jones and myself ran a masterclass on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library” and I gave a talk on “The Blogging Librarian: Avoiding Institutional Inertia“.

Returning To ILI 2008

I had intended to participate at the ILI 2008 conference, but as I have been invited to present a paper at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference, I will unfortunately not be able to attend. I will be there in spirit, though with my colleagues Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman this year facilitating the half-day blogging workshop.

I would like to take this opportunity to give my thanks to everyone who has helped to make the ILI conference series such a great success, especially the conference organisers (including Marydee Ojala, Jane Dysart, Nancy Garman, David Raitt, Bill Spence, Jean Mulligan) and the people I’ve met at ILI (too numerous to mention, but I should include Michael Stephens, Mary Peterson, Frank Cervone, Karen Blakeman, Phil Bradley, Darlene Fichter and Peter Scott). All my best wish to everyone at ILI 2008 – and all the best for the next 10 years.

Usage Statistics for the IWMW 2008 Live Video Stream

The first live streaming of talks at a IWMW event took place at IWMW 2006, when we experimented with an in-house streaming service and use of the Access Grid.  The following year live streaming of the plenary talks was provided by staff at the University of York, and recordings of most of the talks were subsequently made available on Google Video.

On both occasions the numbers of people watching the live streaming video was low, with the maximum numbers of viewers being less than 20 at each of the events. Despite the low numbers we felt the service was valuable as it provided us with an opportunity to gain experience of not only various streaming technologies but also, and more importantly, the non-technical aspects of live streaming at events such as privacy, copyright, accessibility, etc.

This year’s IWMW 2008 event was held in the King’s Conference Centre at the University of Aberdeen.  I was not the only delegate who was impressed by the King’s Auditorium – as one person commented on the event evaluation form “Conference hall had great facilities and microphones meant that you could hear delegates questions“.

The venue also had an excellent AV facilities, and we were pleased that, once again, we were able to stream the plenary talks. The quality of the video was excellent, as you can see if you watch any of the videos of the talks.

But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the live streaming was the numbers of people who watching the talks. As can be seen from the accompanying diagram there were 160 people watching the videos on the final day of the event. As IWMW 2008 attracted 180 participants, with a number of them having to leave before the event finished I suspect we can say that there were more remote people watching Ewan McIntosh’s closing plenary talk on “Unleashing the Tribe” that there were in the King’s Auditorium. When I mentioned this to my director, Liz Lyon, she wondered whether we will soon reach a ‘tipping point’ in which live streaming of talks at large conferences in the digital library environment will be expected as a mainstream offering.

For that to happen, though, there will be a need to establish the business case for providing the streaming service, ensure that it is easy to use and ensure that the risks are being addressed.

The business case is interesting. Who should pay for the costs of providing a video streaming service for an event? Should the costs be taken from the participants who attend the event? Or should remote viewers who wish to access the video stream have to pay? Or perhaps event organisers should be looking for commercial sponsorship to cover the costs (although in light of the current economic turbulence, now is probably not a good time to suggest this).   I wonder, though, whether the costs be covered by the host institution. Once the AV equipment has been installed, can the support costs be included i the rental of the facilities – just as we are now starting to expect access to WiFi network being provided as standard.

Once the business case has been sorted, there will be a need to ensure that the service is easy to use (back at IWMW 2006 people wishing to view the streaming video service needed to install “Real Player and the Xiph Player Plugin or Windows Media Player with the illiminable Ogg Directshow Filters for Speex, Vorbis, Theora and FLAC, with Linux users needing MPlayer with Ogg Theora“). Nowadays users shouldn’t need to concern themselves with details of the technologies, as use of Flash seems to provide the interface to streaming services (although there may be issues about versions of Flash). However I suspect there will be a need to provide a back channel, to enable the remote participants to discuss the talks. There will also be a need for the remote participants to join in discussions with the local audience, especially if a WiFi network is available. There will be a need, therefore, to ensure that the back channel is not tightly coupled to the video streaming service.

Finally there will be a need to address the risks. This will include addressing issues such as privacy, copyright and data protection. In addition there will be a need to consider the quality of service and reliability of the streaming service, especially if the costs in providing the service have been made transparent.

And the more I think about such issues the more I wonder whether live streaming at conferences has reached a tipping point. Might it simply be too much effort to provide on a regular basis?

IWMW 2008 Bar Camps

The main change to the IWMW 2008 timetable this year was the introduction of a barcamp session.  As described on the IWMW 2008 Web site:

Wikipedia defines BarCamp as an international network of user generated conferences, open, participatory workshop events, whose content is provided by participants. A BarCamp is typically one or two full days held at a weekend attended by people with an interest in technology. The day is split into a number of sessions typically of around 30 minutes each. Depending on the number of participants, size of venue, etc. there may be several sessions running simultaneously.

For the IWMW 2008 event we still had the conventional plenary talks and parallel sessions which had been planned in advance. But in addition:

A board [was] provided at IWMW 2008 for people to post up ideas for slots, rooms will then be allocated. Screen projectors will be available in rooms for people to use. During the 45 minute allocated slot there will be time for up to 18 sessions and each session will be 20 minutes long.

This innovation was introduced by my colleague and IWMW 2008 co-chair Marieke Guy, with suggestions from Michael Nolan, Edge Hill University, who shared his experiences of barcamps: “One of the best presentations I’ve seen was titled “stuff I know” and was a guy drawing shapes, arrows and random words on a flip chart while telling us what we should know…“.

And having just had my first glance at the IWMW 2008 feedback forms it seems that the Barcamp idea was a great success.

The Overall views for the event included the comments “Bar camp was an excellent idea that should be utilised more in the future” and “Bit disappointed by the main session but the parallel/barcamp sessions were much better“.

Comments on the Most Valuable Aspects of the Event included
“Barcamp and discussion with others and seeing how successfully people have implemented successful change over the last year“, “Barcamp sessions“, “Barcamp” and “Barcamp” :-)

We were also keen to get feedback on Aspects Which Could Be Improved. Even the responses to this question were all positive about the barcamps: “Bar camps a bit rushed. The session were not too long but changeover times took too much out of 20 mins, More barcamp stuff please-lets build stuff!“, “Barcamps not long enough” and “Not enough time left between barcamp sessions to get from one room to the next“.

The Barcamp Topics

The barcamps were clearly a success. But what topics were covered? A list of the topics is provided on the IWMW 2008 Web site and is also given below. And note that a page has been created on the IWMW 2008 Ning social network which will enable the barcamp facilitators (and, indeed, the participants) to provide a summary of the session, notes on the discussions and links to relevant resources.

Session1: Wednesday 23^rd July 2008 from 14.15-14.35

1. Sex, Lies and Microsites [see Ning page]
2. So What Is A Good Open Source CMS?  [see Ning page]
3. Stuff You Need To Know About iTunesU [see Ning page]
4. How Can A WCMS Save £3.4 Million In 12 Months? [see Ning page]
5. Tenish 5-Minute Ways To Improve Your Website [see Ning page]
6. Web Analytics Guiding Web Development [see Ning page]
7. Web 2.0 In Student Activism: What We Can Learn From Anonymous [see Ning page]
8. How Qualified Do You Have To Be To Manage A Website? [see Ning page]

Session 2: Wednesday 23^rd July 2008 from 14.40-15.00

1. Canadian View On Life, Dearth and Social Software [see Ning page]
2. DIY CMS – Building A Low Budget System, Getting People To ‘Buy-In’ [see Ning page]
3. Immediacy WCMS In Action [see Ning page]
4. T4 CMS / Sitestat / Redesign / Rambling Q&A / Discussion [see Ning page]
5. Barriers To Making Things Work On Second Life [see Ning page]
6. Simple Scriptaculuous [see Ning page]
7. Forum: Feedback on Nedstat [see Ning page]
8. Migrating Into A CMS – What Is Your Experience? [see Ning page]
9. Live@EDU [see Ning page]

Of course, as the barcamps were fairly informal and may have been provided on an ad hoc basis, there is no requirement for the facilitators to provide such resources, but I think it is useful to have a record of the sessions which were held and to provide an opportunity for those who may wish to have a summary of the session to do so, without myself or Marieke acting as a bottleneck to the creation of such resources.

The ‘Chat’ Infrastructure At IWMW 2008

The First Use Of Realtime Chat An IWMW Event

The IWMW 2005 event held at the University of Manchester on 6-8^th July 2005 was the first time that a WiFi network was used at UKOLN’s IWMW annual event. I had attended the EUNIS 2005 conference a few week’s prior to this and presented a paper on Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences. This paper described the potential benefits which networked applications could provide to what Lorcan Dempsey subsequently described as Amplified Conferences. As described in that paper we ensured that we described the technologies which would be available at the IWMW 2005 event and provided an AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) covering use of the technologies.

I think there were less than 20 participants who made use of the event ‘chat’ infrastructure, which was provided by IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and those taking part were mainly Web managers ho had a very technical focus, as can be seen from the IRC archives. The nature of the discussions changed, however, on the second day of the event, the 7th July 2005 or, as it became known 7/7 – a date that (fortunately) is not as globally significant as 9/11 but, especially for those with London connections, a date which will be associated with the London Bombings.

It was a very surreal experience following a message on the IRC channel about was was initially reported as a train crash on the London Underground, and the subsequent discussion.

Jul 07 10:08:02 <Tim>explosion on london underground. entire network closed!!
Jul 07 10:09:04 <–DavidBailey has quit (Quit: CGI:IRC (EOF))
Jul 07 10:10:06 <JeremySpellerUCL>explosion where?
Jul 07 10:10:15 <Tim>liverpool street
Jul 07 10:10:35 <JeremySpellerUCL>Grief
Jul 07 10:10:40 <Tim>metropolitan line, two trains collided, several wounded
Jul 07 10:10:58 <Stuart_Steele_Aston>Tthe bbc site is grinding?
Jul 07 10:11:02 <JMHarmer>bbc news site not responding – u saw the news report? prrsumably everyone else is trying to now.

The launch of a WiFi-enabled IWMW event will be one that will be remembered for a long time  by those who took part in the discussions on that day.

The ‘Back Channel’ At IWMW 2008

Moving forward to IWMW 2008 we knew that many of the participants would expect a real time communications infrastructure to be provided, as this has been the norm at IWMW and many other UKOLN events since 2005. And as we were video streaming the plenary talks we expected to have remote participants joining in the discussions, too.

Over time the terms used to refer this technology has developed. Use of the term ‘chat’ has decreased, in part due to its derogatory connotations but also due to a move away from IRC to move native Web-based communications technologies. I have heard the term ‘back channel’ being used, and this term works when it is used if (as was the case with Ewan McIntosh, the final plenary speaker at IWMW 2008) it is used to provide realtime feedback to a speaker.  But more commonly the realtime communications technology is used by the audience (both those physically present, those watching a video stream and also, in some cases, those who may only have access to an audio stream or are viewing the PowerPoint slides). The term ‘micro blog’ has also been used (indeed this is how I described the service on the IWMW 2008 Web site) but that suggests a official commentary on an event, rather than the discussion forum which was how the service was actually used). I don’t think there is yet a widely agreed term to describe this, so for now I’ll use the term ‘back channel’.

Since IWMW 2007 Twitter has become very popular in certain circles, and most IWMW 2008 participants will have heard of it, even if they weren’t Twitter users. However we decided not to suggest use of Twitter as the event back channel, as, when I’ve tried this previously, I’ve found it is too intrusive those who follow me on Twitter who aren’t at the event or aren’t interested in the event.

There was a need for a tool, I felt, similar to Twitter, but which was less intrusive. I had some experience of Coveritlive (at events such as the eFoundations Symposia – although I haven’t been able to find the archive of the discussions). However I found a number of niggles with that software, including the need to (normally) approve comments.   In response to a tweet for alternative suggestions I decided to make use of Scribbeitlive.

This did have some advantage, but also some weaknesses. As Andy Powell commented on the eFoundations blog:

My feeling is that ScribbleLive makes better use of screen real-estate.  On the other hand, Coveritlive has better bells and whistles and more facilities around moderation (which can be good or bad depending on what you want to do).  In particular (and somewhat surprisingly), Coveritlive handles embedded URLs much better than ScribbleLive.  Overall, my preference is slightly twoards Coveritlive – though I could be swayed either way.

In response to Andy’s post Matt Jukes and Phil Wilson suggested that neither tool was ideal for the job. I would agree with this – I think we will see much development in this area, not only in enhancing the usability of the tools but also in allowing the data to be more easily integrated with other tools. I would like, for example, to be able to have tools to allow me to export the data to other environments (I have migrated the content to the IWMW 2008 Web site, but I had to do that manually). It would also be useful to be able to link comments with particular presneter’s slides or the video – without having the disucssion having to be tightly-coupled with the multimedia experience (as seems to be the case with, for example, the Elluminate service).

Another comment Andy made was “the importance of having someone in the venue dedicated to supporting remote participants “. Again I would agree with this. This was an area I had responsibility for – but found that I was not able to do this at the start of the second afternoon due to difficulties in connecting to the WiFi network. I also found myself failing to support the remote participants during Ewan McInitosh’s talk because I found it so interesting! But if we do need dedicated support for remote participants there will clearly be a cost in providing this support. Does this mean we should start to charge remote participants, I wonder?

Popular IWMW 2008 Presentations

We encouraged presenters and workshop facilitators at IWMW 2008 to make their slides available on Slideshare using the IWMW2008 tag. And I’m pleased to say that not only have a number of the slides have been uploaded, but that they getting large numbers of views.

The most watched slide is Ewan McIntosh’s Unleasing The Tribe closing keynote talk. However the figures are somewhat misleading, as the slides were uploaded a month ago, after Ewan gave a similar talk at a conference in Ireland. Discounting this the most popular slides and from the workshop session on “Mind Mapping for Effective Content Management” given by Gareth Saunders and Stephen Evans (University of St Andrews) following by Michael Nolan’s slides on “Stuff What we’re doing at Edge Hill University“.

I am pleased that the resources which were delivered to about 20-30 people at each of the two sessions I’ve mentioned have been shared with, and used by, a much larger community. Let’s do more of this, I say.

And if you are wondering why Gareth and Stephen’s slides are so popular, why now view them for yourself, or read Gareth’s blog post about his session.

Use of Twitter to Support IWMW Events

Twitter has been used at a number of events recently, often as a discussion channel for participants and, on occasions when a live video stream is available, as a channel to facilitate discussions and questions with remote participants.

However there are potential problems with use of Twitter in this way. If, for example, only a small number of one’s Twitter followers are at the event (or interested in the event) the tweets can be annoying – as I found when I used Twitter to comment on a conference I was attending in Taiwan back in April.

There are other micro-blogging tools which may be better suited for use at events, which I’ll comment on in a forthcoming post. In this post I’d like to comment on the approach taken to use of Twitter to support the recent IWMW 2008 event.

For this event an ‘official’ IWMW Twitter account was set up. This was intended to provide a channel for the event organisers to deliver messages to participants who chose to follow the IWMW Twitter account.  A particular benefit of use of Twitter is that you can configure your Twitter account so that posted from selected Twitter accounts can be delivered as SMS text messages to your mobile phone free-of-charge.

The need for a communications channel for event organisers first occurred to me several years ago, when travel was being disrupted by floods. I asked participants at an event I was attended if they would be willing to give details of their mobile phone number to an organiser of an event, for use in emergencies.  The majority indicated that they would be happy with this and we became aware of the need to have the mobile phone numbers of speakers at our events when a bus failed to turn up to take delegates (including one of the speakers) to the lecture theatre at IWMW 2004.

So we updated our IWMW booking form back in 2005 in order to record mobile phone numbers.  The event organisers had this data available on a spreadsheet, but this could only be used to contact individuals – we didn’t have the backend processes to send bulk text messages to the delegates, and we were not keen on spending additional time and effort on evaluating and deploying software to allow us to do this. But as the middle day of the IWMW 2006 event took place on the 7/7 (the day of the London bombings) we felt this was something we would need to explore at some point.

After gaining experience in use of Twitter over the past year it struck me that this might provide a communications channel between the IWMW event organisers and the participants. And as the participants simply need to sign up for a free Twitter account and can then choose to have posts delivered to their mobile phone it avoids the need for us to store and manage the mobile phone numbers and to establish a service for sending text messages.  Perhaps best of all, the users are in control of whether or not they wish to receive text messages.

Twitter was used to send a small number of posts.  One of these was sent (automatically, using the Easy Tweets service which can be used to schedule posts) at 12.30, at the start of the event, reminding people to send their mobile phones to silent mode.

And we did have one example which demonstrated the potential benefits of this service – I was handed a set of keys belonging to one of the delegates. I sent a message out on Twitter and within a few minutes someone came up to me telling me that he had misplaced his keys. A great example of the benefits of Twitter? Well, not quite, as he wasn’t using Twitter and he came to see me as I was one of the conference organisers :-)

It should also be noted that if Twitter followers sent a message to the IWMW account this could also be delivered to a mobile phone, thus providing a 2-way SMS communications link, without the need to divulge a mobile phone number to conference delegates or organisers – the trusted party, in this case, is Twitter.

Twitter, it seems to me, has great potential in the support of events. Prior to encouraging its use we created a page describing Twitter and how it could be used.  I guess one issue we will need to address is what would happen if Twitter was unavailable during an event? This has been happening a lot recently, and some may argue that you shouldn’t rely on third party services which have proven reliability problems. I don’t agree with this – I regard this use of Twitter as a value-added service and if Twitter is not available we will use the communication channels we used previously. But what do you think?

Social Networks Can Be Just For Christmas

Due to one of the speaker’s not being able to attend, we had to find, at the last moment, a couple of speakers to take part in the opening session at IWMW 2008. I was pleased that Claire Gibbons, University of Bradford and Mike Ellis, Eduserv, were able to provide brief presentations which helped to engage with the IWMW 2008 theme of The Great Debate.

I videoed Claire’s talk, in which she described why the University of Bradford had set up a social network using Ning. I have previously commented on institutional use of Ning, including Bradford’s service, but it was good to hear why this social network was established (to support newly arrived students) and how it is envisaged that the social network is expected to have an impact only during the first term of the new academic year. Such social networks, according to Claire, don’t always have to have long term sustainability – and maybe a social network can be for just until Christmas.

Please note that this video is available on YouTube (and further details of Claire’s talk are available on the IWMW 2008 Web site).