Face-to-face conferences aren’t what they used to be and that’s ok with me.   How many times have you gone to a face-to-face conference in another city where you rub shoulders with a lot of strangers, listen to a bunch of talking heads with obscure PowerPoint slides in cold dark rooms, make a few acquaintances at the reception, give your talk to a group that may or may not get what you’re talking about, and come home with a printed proceedings that goes on the bookshelf?

My days of passive participation are over and done with:

• For me, the reason to go to a big conference is the small group conversations with people I already know somewhat or with whom I share a common interest
• We have the tools to coordinate and connect before, during and after the event — to keep the conversation going (it starts before the conference and goes afterward as well)

I always want to know who else is attending an event, what they’re thinking about, where people are staying, and where we’re going to eat.  During the conference, it’s useful to eavesdrop on parallel sessions that I’m missing by watching the twitter stream.  And it’s helpful to be able to look at people’s slides right away, and to find related materials that’s mentioned or written during the conference.   And it’s nice to see photos of the event afterward, too.

Tagging before, during and after a conference is a key tool for using a big conference as a kind of host system a smaller group that wants to connect.  The economics of face-to-face meetings leads to big conferences.  The economics of meaning-making require smaller, but not closed, conversations.

Apart from email, forums, teleconferences, mobile phones, and other technologies, tagging is useful for enabling a small group to use a large conference as a platform for its own purposes.  It’s an example of a technology that allows the integration across tools by means of a practice and a protocol (as we discuss in Chapter 4 of Digital Habitats).

Using CPsquare’s “sidecar” participation in the AoIR Conference (which coincided with the EPIC conference) as an example, here are some observations of how tagging can play a role in supporting a subgroup’s participation at a big conference.

• Emergent intention.  Early on nobody knows for sure who will be there and therefore whether it’s worth going.  Email discussions about who’s going are key to establishing that there will be some kind of quorum which would make a long trip worthwhile.  But at a certain point, tagging the resources that emerge is essential.  Four months after tagging the AoIR conference, for example, we noticed that the EPIC conference was scheduled the same week.  That coincidence turned out to be a key to the dynamics of the conversation.
• Fuzzy social boundaries.  Tagging is open in the sense that anybody can use it and it’s visible to everyone. Tagging prospective participants or presentations is a way of encouraging participation.  Looking at the tagstream, for example, you can see that Sus Nyrop, who did participate, was hoping that Christina Costa would join us (although she couldn’t make it in the end).
• Identification of relevant resources .  Being together at a conference may focus on a particular topic, but you have to identify a lot of other relevant resources like where to stay.  We used the lodging page from a previous conference in Copenhagen to figure out where our group might stay.
• Multiple outputs. Active participation generates a lot of different outputs. Tagging is the ideal way to keep track of them.  Delicious links are here. Flickr photos are here.  Not much video produced at that conference.
• Distributed leadership. Although I used the “cp2oir08” tag more than anybody else, others used it as well.  The goal is to coax people to contribute, whether it’s a tag you came up with or not.

Tips

• Propose a tag early.  Announce it by email or by other means to get the word out.
• Tag should be as intuitive and descriptive as it can be but as short as possible.
• Weave tagging into group practice and tagged resources into the conversation.  Mention what’s been tagged by you or what you’ve found in the tagstream that others should know about.
• Think of the tagstream a community-building resource. A tagstream is the accumulation of tagged materials contributed by everyone, which  is stored on a tagging platform such as delicious, and which retrieved or monitored via an RSS feed (but which can also be viewed as a web page).
• Identify related or parallel tags (such as “ir9” that was used for the AoIR conference as a whole on Flickr, delicious, and Twitter).
• Think of the tagstream as an ideal research tool, when you’re going back to figure out what happened or when.

Photo by Bev Trayner.

Carrie Gilbert, the CHIFOO program chair, and I came up with the idea of a “CHIFOO Tagging Project,” as described on the CHIFOO site:

In keeping with our 2009 Program Series’ theme of “Collaboration,” CHIFOO will be embarking on an experiment in online/offline community-building. Here’s what we’re asking everyone in CHIFOO to do: When you come across online articles, resources, discussions, and so on that you would like to share with the CHIFOO community as a whole, tag them with the del.icio.us bookmark ”chifoo09”.

Because I couldn’t make it to the January meeting and I guess the agenda was full, the project was announced without a lot of context in the website.  So, since December, there have been more than 80 items tagged on Delicious, by fellene, mattholm, pheuser, skry, and, yours truly, smithjd.  Skry, in particular has dived in with gusto, tagging dozens and dozens of things.  I’m going to try to give a lot more context and focus to the idea tonight.

Eventually, I’m hoping that there can be some social, reflective activity around the tagging practice, along the lines of Beth Kanter’s regular summaries of the NPtech tagstream.  I feel like I should demonstrate in place what I’m talking about.  Hence this post.  Being very lazy, I did some screen-scraping and put the tags that were used with chifoo09 in wordle to get a kind of topic summary:

That’s not a bad glimpse into what I think CHIFOO members are thinking about.  I noticed that Wordle will take a URL, so thinking that producing a really easy summary of a tag stream without having to resort to screen-scraping and regular expressions and time consuming geekery, I inserted the tag’s url: http://delicious.com/tag/chifoo09 .  This is what I got:

Twitter? That didn’t make much sense. Digging a bit, it turns out that Wordle was looking at the default 10 tagged items, and an 11-year-old blogger named Gloson from Malasia was featured at the top of the page.  Well, perhaps he should have a voice in the CHIFOO conversation.  Have a look.  Discuss.

I guess like every tagstream, there is more in it than you can possibly explore in one sitting.  You have to have some decision rules to prevent getting lost.  Here’s one rule: what are the most-tagged items that are also tagged with the CHIFOO09 tag?  Here are the three most-frequently-tagged:

• 22,708
• 11,698
• 7,128

That’s a pretty pretty geeky set of items.

What are other stopping rules?

Once I do explain it to people they’ll often say, “Wow, that’s a pretty narrow niche!”  It’s true, but look at three talks that I’m working on right now:

• Provided that the trains run smoothly in Spain, today I’m meeting with people from the ministry of education in Colombia to give feedback on a plan for communities of practice for educators.  It’s fascinating to see all the connections between education in the US and in Colombia.  It’s a bit of extra effort to read their plan, which is in Spanish.  It took me a while, for example to figure out that “taslapada” was a typo and they meant “traslapada” (overlapped).  Before I figured it out, I was grumbling to myself, “Why do educators have to use such obscure language?”
• Next Wednesday night I’m giving a talk at CHIFOO that feels ambitious to me.  I’m trying to do two different things. First, I’m arguing that design “in a Web 2.0 world” has to start with communities, not end there, as an afterthought.  And second I’m pushing the idea of getting everyone to tag stuff that’s relevant to the year’s discussions (“Collaboration at Work: Putting the ‘Us’ in User Experience”).  I think a lot of people have found that once a community finds its groove in face-to-face mode, it’s difficult to add a tool to its repertoire, even when the community is made up of folks that are as smart as the CHIFOO folks.  (Maybe it will be eaiser than I’ve thought, since any face-to-face discussion more than 50 items have been tagged so far since I proposed the tag in early December: http://delicious.com/tag/chifoo09.
• The Wednesday after that I’m doing a talk with Beverly Trayner at  the Human Capital Institute.  I’m afraid that we’ve promised to explain how all the world’s e-learning problems can be solved in one hour.  Not only that, we’re doing the presentation on a webinar platform which has not been my favorite type of software but which I’m finally going to have to deal with.

So I may be very “niched”, but I’m also feeling very stretched.  Yay!

• “Tweets” from twitter.com that have a particular hashtag
• Photos from flickr.com that have the same hashtag
• links from delicious.com that have that same hashtag

Here’s a silly example:

http://twemes.com/tlapd08

It turns out that the combination of those three special-purpose sites is very nice for supporting events, whether face-to-face or otherwise, allowing a group of people who agree on a tag to combine messages and resources on the fly.  Here’s a more serious example, where a lot of people at a recent Community 2.0 Conference in Las Vegas used it to share resources and for back-channel chatting during the conference:

http://twemes.com/c20

It’s a bit of a problem that a short tag like “c20″ because it can have different meanings to different people, so that one person’s use of the tag can be remarkably different from another’s.  But it’s even more of a problem that for some reason Twemes seems to have only one-fourth of the tweets with a given hashtag.  That’s my count with the silly “Talk Like A Pirate Day” tag. At this point Twemes has 4 tweets, while the same tag (without the photos or delicious links) on Twitter’s own search site has 13.  I would rather have Twitter be transparent and let others do the mashing!