Tag Archives: events

Events 2.0 roundup..

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I’ve read a few interesting bits and pieces the last week or two about events again so I thought I’d just put together a quick post covering them.

Tony at Crowdvine has written an interesting post on the Crowdvine blog about adding an unconference element to an existing event which is something I think is a good idea and will be seen more often in events as it allows the sponteniety of the unconference also allows a more tranditional route for conference goers who prefer that format (or those like myself who prefer the abiity to pick ‘n’ mix!).  Its useful advice from a guy with alot of experience of events in general and someone who has recently done exactly what he is talking about so its worth reading.  Not surprisingly it ends with a plug for Crowdvine – but can’t say I have a problem with that as I think Crowdvine is a useful tool for events and certainly the most event-centric of the diy social networks out there.

David Wilcox has been talking about what he is trying to capture from events as he continues to document events with his phone, video camera and alot of hard work.  I think its interesting but I think personally that some kind of media capture of the ‘stuff’ (read the post to understand the context) is important as well – too often the presentations lack coherence without the addition of at least an audio track and the post (or pre) event papers often miss out on those eureka moments that happen in front of a live audience – especially during Q and As.

I also came across the O’Reilly Ignite events concept this week and like the idea of adding something like this to an existing more formal event – I imagine it creates a very different energy and could help allieviate the dips that often seemto happen at big events.  I love the idea of Ignite in a Box as well – a really useful resource that I hope I get the chance to use some day!

Finally its been really interesting watching the 2gether08 conference come together online – not only does it have an innovative bunch of speakers, sessions and ideas on the days it also has been wonderfully innovative in the manner its been organised and after a brief upturn in my financial situation I am hoping to be able to attend for at least part of the conference now.

Promoting events using the social web..

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Stephanie Booth recently ran the Going Solo conference for freelancers in the wacky world of the social web and she has documented her experiences of using social web tools and more traditional methods (not least hard work and one-on-one contacts) to promote the event and identifies things she would do differently in the future and where it worked well.

I think its a great post and makes perfect sense.  I firmly believe that there is still a role for more traditional communications tools in promoting events (and other activities) and while I am personally most comfortable with the digital aspects of the work that makes the other channels no less important.

The need to make use of your own contacts to reach out to a wider community makes perfect sense but is something I find difficult – its just something that sits easily with me but I think I should get over it!

Anyway its worth reading and I for one will refer to it next time I’m involved in supporting an event so thanks Stephanie!

Events 2.Oh god not another 2.0!

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So as I spend more time focussing on what I am going to fill my days with as a freelancer in the near future one topic keeps coming to the top of the list and that is events.  This will almost certainly amuse many of my ex-JISC colleagues as I did little but moan about events during my time there but as time went on I started to get my head around them and began to identify opportunities to do interesting things around events and ways to improve some of the processes involved in running them.

For this years JISC Conference I had the perfect working relationship!  I worked on the early planning stages identifying speakers, topics for sessions, ideas for the venue and some of the thinking around sponsorship. Then I left all the hard work to Grace and Greg!  They have worked incredibly hard pulling together a brilliant looking conference that filled its 750 places in record time!

Anyway then I wandered back in a few months later and gave a presentation to the team about using the social web to build a community and a buzz around the event.  Crazy bunch that they are they bought into it all and so this years conference will have a Crowdvine social network, live blogging, lots of twittering, a bit of Flickr-ing and also some uStreaming!  All-in-all I think it should be good fun and add to the conference.  I hope to do alot more of this kind of thing and think it suits a great deal of JISC-type of events and I think its exactly the sort of thing that makes the social web so interesting.

Anyway one of the pieces to the puzzle that I had been lacking was an easy way to aggregate all this online activity – not just from the JISC guys but from everyone else.  I played around with Yahoo Pipes and various saved searches on Google Blog search and Technorati but could not quite get my head around what I wanted and how to display it.  I was sure it was a good idea though and even bought a domain name (www.eventstreams.org but we’ll get back to that later!) for the eventual web app that would make me my fortune!  Anyway I couldn’t work it out and couldn’t afford to eLance it so I gave up on the idea….then lo and behold via the power of Twitter Mike Ellis – (former Museum web maestro and now something important sounding at Eduserv) announces his new side project is called http://www.onetag.org and to quote

“the idea is to find a way of encapsulating the excitement, “liveness” and buzz of a conference or event – in real time – but also as a way of collecting as much of the discussion as is possible, for later browsing or archiving.”

Now that sounds just about perfect for what I had in mind so I got in touch with Mike and am now doing a bit of beta testing for him but also hoping to use the tool in my upcoming work (especially the very cool slideshow element that would look great on a big plasma on the JISC stand!)

Anyway in keeping with my event theme earlier today Ryan Carson tweeted about a new blog post over at Carsonified about their new internal app Event Stream -  (see I told you my domain name would come up again!).  As they run more and more conferences (including the new one to their portfolio Fuel – which sounds right up my street! ) Carsonified decided to build an event management system (EMS?) to simplify the booking process and back end processes.  This might sound simple but believe me event booking forms are the devils work and few if any are much use and they all seem to ignore the strides in user experience taken everywhere else on the web!  I think this could be a real winner and hope they make it a public app some time in the future especially if a) they added a way of managing parallel sessions at an event and b)it allowed custom CSS and domain mapping (for a price of course!)  I can think of a number of people who would be interested off the top of my head.

The other thing I’d like to see – though this might just be me being a bit mental as it seems so obvious people must of thought of it – is to combine the booking process automatically with an event social network.  The info you give when you sign up for an event is close to that of creating a profile anyway so why not combine them and offer a small focussed network that just enhances networking opps but doesn’t try to be a fully fledged Facebook clone.  Maybe I’m missing something obvious – it happens alot!

Anyway one way or another I guess I am going to stick with this social web enabled events theme for a while and see where it goes – smarter people than me seem to think its a good idea!