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Thank you to Katrin Verclas, Holly Ross, and anyone else at NTEN who helped make this happen. I know I'm not the only one who, year after year, has wanted to see proper Wifi and backchannel support at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. Now, for the 2007 conference coming up in two weeks, not only have they done it, but they've done it well: free and ubiquitous wireless access, eight major sessions with community moderated chat, unmoderated chat throughout, a mailing list, and some experimenting with both Twitter and texting. They are encouraging people to tag posts and bookmarks with '07NTC' for aggregation of distributed commentary. Obviously, they will themselves be blogging on the N-TEN site. It's an impressive effort.
There are plenty of ways to improve all this. They are using the web-based Gabbly for discussion, which I suspect will frustrate many people. Traditionally, IRC has served the backchannnel very well at other conferences. Perhaps someone can set one up informally? More importantly, they are not making any provisions for serving the presenters needs in regard to facilitating the engagement of participants. I know we're not there yet and that we have to live with some tension and chaos as we look for new models of interaction, but it would serve everyone's interests if presenters could tap into and influence the backchannel, just as they currrently facilitate questions and answers or small group discussion. Presenters give a lot and at the NTC they are almost all volunteers. They need to be able to focus energy and channel input constructively, but the cross-media options for doing that are far from obvious.
Posted: 3/22/07; 2:41:28 PM # |
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