Backchannel and group organization
Les Blogs was interesting because it was a mini-model of a group organization using social tools to self-organize in real time. I don’t usually by all this “realtime organizing multimedia collaboration instant seamless 2.0 yadda yadda” stuff, but this was just interesting. The choice of tools was not too wide and everyone was free to use whatever different subset suited him and as much or little as she wanted to contribute.
- the event blog/site
- the wiki linking to the event’s Frappr map and having a self-organized Sunday meetup
- tagged content on various sites
- the backchannel which was essentially a real-time chat channel. Originally they had some weird web-based chat thing which reportedly didn’t work for everyone, so they switched to a standard IRC channel.
Now the backchannel was interesting, I’ve been to quite a few events of different content and audience but this was the first one where one was used and advertised to such an extent. Well computer parties have their “channel” but it’s a bit different. I was on it and found it kinda neat idea that did definitely add something to the content.
The backchannel was used for discussion more or less relevant to the current topic or speaker. You could notice how during the more interesting topics where the speaker was really engaging (Hammersley) everyone practically shut up in backchannel and listened to the speaker, whereas during the not-so-engaging ones there was active discussion in backchannel. At times, the backchannel was also beamed to the bigscreen which was kind of unfortunate for the speaker, as the screen was behind him and unless he had a laptop, he didn’t see what the folks were saying whereas everyone else could.
There was some discussion about whether it’s nice to “backchannel” the speakers or not, and this is where the Mena vs dotBen discussion came from. Mena was saying you should be nice to everyone and not say things in backchannels or blogs you wouldn’t say in real life, and dotben said that was bull. And then stood up and made his point quite credibly. I don’t really want to take sides here, it didn’t bother me as a speaker particularly that I was backchanneled and couldn’t read it. At events like this you can expect people to be frank and honest with you and if you suck, it’s just that — you suck, and it will be said to you. The only thing I’m missing is a full backchannel archive so I could read after the fact what was said about me and the panel and if there’s something I could learn from it.
So it turned out that backchannel was on IRC and I really quickly needed an IRC tool. The only widely used one I know is IRC and I didn’t want to get that on this laptop. Fortunately some people pointed it out to me that I already have a tool for it, the Opera browser which indeed did work quite well for it. Here’s a picture. I like the clean interface — for example timestamps are only displayed when the minute changes, and to the minute precision, instead of second, which is a right thing to do unless you’re an übergeek for who it makes a difference whether something was posted 12:11:43 vs 12:11:56.
And since I’m not sure where the backchannel is archived if at all, here’s as I saw it, from Monday afternoon onwards. It has omissions when I went to breaks or when the wifi was down and up. In a simple format, didn’t bother to format, look at the screenshot and compare to the text and you’ll figure it out (basically some lines are prefixed with tabs when there’s a timestamp).
… found the full log with nicer formatting.
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