Day: February 25, 2009

just to be in the presence of others who understand

image by 2-dog-farm on Flickr ccA few weeks ago I had the great pleasure to jam in an impromptu telecon with Jessica Lipnak, Luis Suarez, Jenny Ambrozek, Lilly Evans, and June Holley about all things online. It was a sort of a net-worker’s jam. Thursday Feb. 26th, at 10am PST we are doing it again. Leave a comment if you want to join us.

Today at 3pm PST, we are doing something similar with a handful of visual practitioners and those interested in the role of visuals in our work.  You can find the details here.

These ad hoc gatherings came out of connections on Twitter. Wondering out loud, finding each other and then moving to action. Pretty cool.

More importantly, they fill a hole that Jessica articulated beautifully with this comment “just to be in the presence of others who understand.” This may mean with people who know us deeply. Or with people who care about something we care about – deeply. These are two kinds of “knowing” – one relational and one domain related. But there is a deep pleasure in basking in conversation with people you “know.”  A joy. A happy dance. 😉

So if you want to join us, let me know. Find your way and connect!

Photo credit:

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by 2-Dog-Farm

Crowdsourcing Conference Note-Taking

I’m still working on my NorthernVoice09 conference recap, but I had been meaning to check out the amazing Raul/Hummingbird604’s live blogging of the conference. I had not realized Raul was using Coveritlive WITH Twitter. So he was tweeting his live coverage and pulling in any other tweets with the #northernvoice09 hashtag at the same time. VERY clever.
photo by Tris Hussey, cc on Flickr
Take a peek at one of them:  Rob Cottingham on Teh Funny. The mashup of Raul’s intentional notes and the audience’s reaction, while not always coherent, is very cool. However, I can’t judget since I was there. It would be interesting to hear from one of you who was not there how coherent this crowdsourced live blogging is. This is another example of using the network. One person can’t do it all, even the amazing Raul. Having done a lot of liveblogging in the past, I know how much energy it takes!

I wonder what would happen if a smaller, defined group did this with a specific session tag. Does a group create a more coherent record, or the network? (EDITED IN LATER: Check out Beth Kanter’s great blog post on working with conference backchannel which could be considered unto itself conference capture or note taking.)

Just to recover, the peripatetic Raul is committing to one day a week of slow blogging. Raul, you MUST read Barbara Ganley’s blog!

Photo of Raul – ©Tris Hussey, 2009. Non-commerical use permitted with attribution