Comments on: CILIP 2.0

By: Katie Fraser

Katie Fraser — Thu, 07 May 2009 12:30:52 +0000

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.

By: Nicola McNee

Nicola McNee — Wed, 06 May 2009 13:07:15 +0000

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.

By: Dom Fripp

Dom Fripp — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:06:34 +0000

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.

By: Brian Kelly

Brian Kelly — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:03:47 +0000

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’)

By: Zak Mensah

Zak Mensah — Wed, 06 May 2009 09:17:37 +0000

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.