At the end of a posting a couple of days ago, I wrote:
In December 2010, the 7th World Congress of Conductive Education takes place in Hong Kong. I am greatly looking forward to the adventure of being there. I am also wondering how the social web can be deployed to (a) enhance the experience of all of us who aspire to be there and (b) engage everyone who cannot in the experience - before, during and after the Congress. What would we need to do? Could 2010 be the firstinternet World Congress? How?
Andrew Sutton picked up on this and, at the end of a posting on his blog, wrote:
I do hope that Norman and other people in the know might come up with some practical suggestions (my measure of whether things are ‘practical’ being that even I can work them).
Whilst I cannot claim to be "in the know", I have been thinking about "practical suggestions".
Let's go to a conference. You know, you get there and everyone knows everyone else, everyone except you that is. Have you been to that conference? I went to one a couple of weeks ago. Knew nobody. By the time I'd worked out who I should be talking to in the 'networking' sessions, I was on the M1 heading back home to Paces.
Wouldn't it be good if people could meet up beforehand? Maybe plan the journey to Hong Kong together. Meet up and share a meal? Or a taxi from the airport. Or find out if old friends from other countries we met in Sweden or Budapest or London or Urakawa might be there. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could maybe talk about some of the presentations that interested us - and the questions we hoped the speakers might answer? Put names to faces.
With CrowdVine all of this is possible. Someone on Twitter alerted me to it. From there, I emailed Tony Stubblebine to find out more about how CrowdVine can enhance the conference experience. He sent me links to a couple of examples and I found another myself. Conferences are generally for attendees only, so a CrowdVine conference site is usually 'closed'. However, these examples are 'open' to all to share. Take a look:
Tony says: "Here are three UK networks that are publicly browsable:
Future ChoicesJISC, an educational support conference
ALT-C, an educational technology conference
Medicine2.0 "How social networking changes health, health care and biomedical research". Toronto.
These are conferences for people with particular shared interests. How much sense would they make of our World Congress? So don't be put off by the content - or the specialised language - try to focus on the simple stuff and what everyone can get out of it.
I do not know if anyone at SAHK reads this blog. I'd be flattered to think so. I'm greatly looking forward to meeting you next year - or maybe sooner, at http://7thWorldCongress.crowdvine.com/*
* Don't try to link to it - it exists only in my imagination!
There you are Andrew, there's one idea. I'll see what else I can come up with. Didn't you post something on Twitter in the middle of a conference in America a while ago?
BTW "meet smarter" is CrowdVine's strapline, if that's the right term.