Something that made SoCon07 as amazing an experience as it was (in my opinion) was the social network that Tony Stubblebine created for us through his new service Crowdvine.
The SoCon07 social networking site was set up on Crowdvine before the conference and word was sent out for people to start joining. As someone who likes to prep before each conference I go to, this was indispensable as I was able to make a list of people I wanted to introduce myself to over the course of the weekend. It also gave us the opportunity to begin to connect and really begin the conference before any of us met face to face.
During the conference, I had the opportunity to control the big screen in the main auditorium. My job (besides flipping through the slides during Leonard's talk) was to facilitate the discussion during the unconference portions of the demiconference by pulling up relevant information on the screen as the conversation progressed. I've done this for a few conferences in the past which is most likely why got stuck with the job here. Little did I know that Crowdvine would make this experience totally different from the others.
Whereas my past experiences were hectic and a bit scattered in trying to find relevant info to put up on the screen during conversation, having access to the social networking site made this process easy. Every time someone stood up and was given the microphone, I would put their profile up on the screen for everyone to see. Often, l would click on the links to their blogs which gave further insight into who it was that we as a group were communicating with. For the most part, relevant web pages to the discussion were clicks away rather then google searches away, and the people stayed central to the whole experience. I'm not sure about everyone else, but I derived alot of value from this!
This is yet another example of the power of social media. Crowdvine enabled us to begin the conference early, and afterwords it is allowing us to continue the conversation. It is more then just a social network, it also aggregates everyone's blogs! This has enabled me to add two feeds to my rss feed reader: the blog posts for everyone who attended SoCon07 and joined the social network, as well as the blog posts for every one of the people I friended (and am still in the process of friending). These two rss feeds immediately represent the continuation of the conference, and the connections I am making. As discussion on the conference itself starts to taper down in the days and weeks ahead, I can just delete these two rss feeds and add my friends and new colleagues to my rss feed reader proper.
I'd like to thank Tony for testing out his new tool on us! Not only has it significantly cut down on my post-conference rss clutter, but it made SoCon07 a new discussion point for what the conference (and unconference) experience should be like in the 21st century.
