SoCon07
Congrats to Jeff on a job well done. The conference was very well organized, very well attended, and very informative.
Two random thoughts: the first is that I thought it was kind of cool how the technical assistant (I didn’t catch his name) was finding relevant web pages to bring up on the main screen while people were talking. At first it was distracting, but after a while I was kind of mesmerized by it. I wonder if you could get professional “Web Jockeys” to do this in other settings. Second, there was this kid sitting next to me with his father, he couldn’t have been more than 14, and he was simultaneously listening to what people were saying and using a tool on his mac to capture video, search flickr for stock photos, manipulate icons, and add captions to create a sort of “living comic book” that tracked what people were saying. I thought it was totally cool… I wanted to give the kid a job, but figured it wouldn’t look too good to employ child labor.
The “unconference” idea is interesting, though it unfortunately requires a certain level of decorum that may be exponentially harder to obtain with larger groups. It began to feel like a town hall meeting at one point… but I did find it entertaining.
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One Response to “SoCon07”
Timothy Moenk
February 13th, 2007
Hiya! I’m the dude who was controlling the main screen. Just wrote a blog post about the experience on my blog: http://tmoenk.typepad.com/tmoenk/2007/02/crowdvine.html
I’m curious, do you think having everyone’s profiles pulled up on the screen as they spoke added to the experience or did it seem more like a novelty? I know that I definitely derived value from it, but I wasn’t in the audience.
Regarding the 14 year old, you could always just offer him an internship.