I’ve been thinking about how you might go about taking the free-form nature of barcamp and merging it with ’static’ industry-expert panel discussions.
Very much in response to discussions after Chinwag’s measuring social media event on Monday.
So…
How about a panel event where there is a set subject and fixed set of panellists - but the areas of discussion are worked out on a wiki by the attendees in the run up to the event?
The agenda would have to be managed to the extent that there could only be, say, 4 or 5 areas of discussion in order to stick to the time frame. You could open up the wiki for general suggestions and comments and then a week or so before the event someone arranges the suggestions into logical groupings in order to form the agenda. (For the panellists’ sake you’d probably want to fix the agenda about a week before the event.)
What do people think?
I collated some brief thoughts about last night’s Chinwag Live: Measuring Social Media and was going to publish them this evening.
Thought I’d check the blogosphere first to make references n’ dat and found that most of what I was going to say had already been articulated far more effectively by considerably more intelligent people than me.
So (in true social-media-analytics styleee) here’s the Google blog search results. The rest is up to you!
My tuppence worth: reckon a social media metrics hack day might be in order.
There have been a couple of posts commenting on the apparent uselessness of web 2.0/social media web apps recently.
Mike Ellis commented that:
None of these tools (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr etc) actually adds anything… All of these tools do add huge amounts of noise, but to me none of them add signal… they’re not doing anything useful for me.
All noise, no signal. Lifestreaming is a timesink
And then godofbiscuits79 commented that Google Reader is ‘not bad though fairly pointless’.
The last comment I’ll put down to web 2.0 naïvety (godofbiscuits79 is my little brother - it would be wrong of me not to take the opportunity to tease him a little about this) but both these comments got me thinking.
Genuine human relationships are essentially useless. Most of us don’t form connections with people because of a transactional value (apart from some business contacts perhaps). My relationships with my friends are based on shared interests or opinions or outlook on life. Sure, some of those relationships come with benefits (like knowing music industry people who can source tickets to sold out gigs ;) ), but these relationships still only last if there is some genuine connection between the parties involved.
At the moment, most of the ‘friends’ I have in online social networks fit into the description above - they are people I share interests, opinions or outlook with. This means social media for me is essentially useless as it facilitates relationships that are essentially useless. But that’s what I like about it the most.
A beautifully written, funny, cynical take on how social sites are ripping apart our carefully constructed online personae.
The Internet permits the happy fracture of our messy selves into more acceptable (or at least internally consistent) personae…
Soc-sites are in the business of assembling a full picture of the meatspace you, using the crumbs you’ve dropped on MySpace, Match, and Megarotic until Humpty Dumpty is put together again.
Wired
I say embrace the concept of meatspace you online, surely it’s only us digital immigrants who feel so uncomfortable about it?
I was at the PRWeek PR, Social Networking & Blogging in Practice conference yesterday.
To be honest, I was sceptical beforehand and my scepticism was at first confirmed by being one of only about 5 people with a laptop, and there being no free wi-fi. Am I too ‘un-conferenced’ these days?
Anyway, in actual fact the day turned out to be extremely useful with a consistently high calibre of speaker and a few genuinely interesting case studies.
Abbreviated notes and comments:
Hello, I'm Jenny Brown.