Collaborative conferences
It seems that a strong underlying theme of this year's
Institutional Web Management Workshop will be
the use of various networking technologies to enhance the overall experience. It will be interesting to see how the delegates take to it. It's become pretty much expected at some of the more avant-garde/hardcore techie events, so much so that being at a conference without wireless feels like being a fish out of water.
The
wikalong annotation service is being used during the conference, and so I've just been trying it out in preparation. It certainly provides a useful way of adding unofficial commentary to a more formal resource, though the Firefox plugin is a little cumbersome and could be much more user-friendly, and the wikalong server seems rather sluggish.
I think wikalong is ideal for reviewing on long timescales - days, months, years. I don't think it will work for 'live' scenarios such as during a conference, however. For that, the best choice has to be collaborative text editors such as
SubEthaEdit, which allow massively parallel note-taking (as seen at the Cocoon GetTogether in
2003 and
2004).
I'll also be interested to see how
jabber holds up with lots of delegates using it. I use messaging clients a lot in my day-to-day work, but the experience has always degraded with more than two or three people in the room at once. I don't think
IRC can be beaten for backchannel communications in conferences. It's simple, fast, and efficient, but maybe not as friendly as messaging clients and it tends to have a bit of an (unwarranted) bad name amongst academic IT services. It took quite a bit of persuading for me to be allowed to run an IRC server back in 1997, when I wanted to set one up for my university employers.
Posted by savs at June 28, 2005 3:58 PM