In February this year Bob McKee, chief executive of CILIP blogged a short article entitled All of a Twitter. The piece quickly took an authoritative tone, casting a bizarre paranoia over ‘informal’ librarians who network away from the closed environment of the CILIP site. A hip-hop beef quickly ensued as web consultant/librarian Phil Bradley posted CILIP: epic fail, declaring his disgust at CILIP’s stance, claiming they were placing a distance between themselves and potential members.
Bradley’s article became a triumph of debate, provoking a barrage of response from Twitter friendly Librarians equally disgusted at McKee’s outburst. Some of this response appeared to be born out of sheer frustration, as non CILIP members were unable to reply to McKee’s post through CILIP’s ’sanctioned’ blog environment.
The outcome of this debate was responded to positively by CILIP, who last week invited Phil Bradley and fellow guru Brian Kelly to present on the use of Web 2.0 technologies to enhance communication within the LIS community. The event also became a platform for experiment, encouraging librarians to discuss the topic over Twitter. Official Tweeters were also assigned, posting up key topics as they were presented at the event.
I have to admit that I was not overtly impressed by this concept. Discussion over the topic began almost 24 hours before the event, using #cilip2 hashtag. Participants were encouraged to use Twitterfall to follow the event, which presents tweets on particular topic in real time. Going back over the transcript of the event quickly reveals how silly this became, as participants with very little to say were using the hashtag, polluting official entries as the list of entries grew longer. The job of following the discussion became intolerable, especially as many of us only had the time to read back in our own time, after working hours.
I believe the use of Twitter to support this event was perhaps naive; the statistics reveal that 150 librarians provided around 1200 tweets. But without naming names a handful of librarians were clearly spamming, an issue which other discussion technologies can already cope with. Overall though the event was undeniably successful in bringing a quantity of professionals together, but quality was compromised.
Whilst I feel Twitter was misused here as an open forum on the future of CILIP, the blog discussion surrounding CILIP 2.0 is superb. The transcript posted on the main CILIP blog is much more easier to follow, and the following articles provoke much more focussed debate:
Brian Kelly’s review of the event
A positive response to the use of Twitter
A much more balanced review, written by Katie Fraser
EDIT: I have corrected a typo, mispelling Brian Kelly’s name. Sorry Brian!
#1 by Zak Mensah on May 6th, 2009
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Great honest post, and have had similar recent experiences of the forced use of Twitter. Those who tweet will do so anyway so advertising the fact it will be used by organisers can lead to extra (look at me!!) tweets and it all becomes too much. It also leads to me having to log out during the downpour of hash comments about something im not at and of low quality.
#2 by Brian Kelly on May 6th, 2009
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Thanks for the post. I think, however, that’s it’s a mistake to regard the archive of the tweets as a reflective summary of the discussions. Rather, I feel, Twitter enabled the remote participants to feel part of a conversation. And I think it was valuable in that respect.
We can (and should) learn from feedback such as yours and look at ways in which we can satisfy the needs of remote participants who want to feel engaged with a discussion and those who wish to have a more reflective and readable summary of the discussions. But let’s remember that if the meeting had failed to make use of (or even ban) Twitter, this would have reinforced a view held by some that CILIP is irrelevant in today’s networked age.
Brian (PS my surname is spelt ‘Kelly’)
#3 by Dom Fripp on May 6th, 2009
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Agree that Twitter wasn’t the best way of capturing the event itself. The apps strengths are in following and generating the debate, not streaming the output. Promising first try though.
#4 by Nicola McNee on May 6th, 2009
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Hi Matt
Hi Matt I’m reading your post with interest.
As a Twitter participant on the day I found the experience empowering. Twitter is all about the moment so although it was good to have all the tweets collected together that wasn’t really the point of it. I’m not sure at all what you mean by “polluting official entries”. Twitter is informal with everyone on equal terms. The whole idea I think of twittering in the background was to create a general buzz and excitement about web2.0 communication. And I hope it achieved that.
#5 by Katie Fraser on May 7th, 2009
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Hi Matt
Thanks for directing people to my blog! I guardedly agree with the points you make in this post. It was very difficult to follow the conversation – or even to have one! – on Twitter, and as a remote alternative to the conference it wasn’t really an alternative at all.
On the other hand, I don’t think any more measured approach would have captured the enthusiasm and variety of views in quite the same way as the Twitter session did. As someone who was able to devote quite a lot of attention to following the discussion (and who ‘played along’ with the slides the presenters had provided) I found the parallel Twitter ‘event’ illuminative, and enormous fun.
There’s a whole community out there that CILIP are failing to engage with, and I think the Twitter showed the potential level of enthusiasm in this community brilliantly. CILIP’s next step is to work out how to effectively engage these people (how to effectively engage me!) in a more productive way. Somewhere between its current way of doing things and a Twitter free-for-all is where that can happen.