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Vote for our SXSWi panel suggestions
Made by Many has an opportunity — actually, three — to host panel discussions at South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2011, but we need your votes to make it happen.
We attended SXSWi 2010 en masse and absolutely loved it — the people, the networking, the keynotes, the panels and the tequila. By bringing together a huge number of creative, freakishly intelligent people SXSWi acts as a sort of ideas incubator for our industry.
The sessions delegates attend set the tone of the year to come: they raise the issues we talk about and tease out the problems we try to solve. The best sessions kick off conversations that lead to technical innovations, new ways of working, unexpected collaborations and all kinds of general awesomeness. Hosting a panel discussion is an opportunity to start some of those conversations.
Here are the things we want to talk about
Good News: Apps, Paywalls, Publishers and Content
News organizations and publishers are walking backwards into the future carrying the cultural and business baggage of 200 years of mass media. Most will die; new models will arise. In the next half decade we expect a wholesale change in the way news is produced and consumed and by the end of this period we’ll know the answer to the question: “If we had never had mass media, what would journalism look like today?” A panel of individuals involved in news innovation looks at the issue from all sides and plots a path from old to new models of sharing what we need to know.
Daddy, You Should Tweet That: Parenting Goes Digital
The parenting web is on fire, with more parents tweeting and more family sites and services launching every month. Social media is fast becoming a huge part of modern parenting, but to what end? Is it here to wreck or revolutionize family time? Is there money to be made in this market, or are savvy parents marketing-proof? A panel of agencies and service designers will explore a series of projects to identify mistakes made, lessons learned, and future directions for the parenting web.
The Last of the Launch-and-Leave ‘Ems
Negotiating the new handover. Agencies are building fewer static campaign-oriented sites and more platforms, communities and services. Cutting the apron strings between agency and digital product immediately after launch doesn’t make practical sense, but maintaining the relationship indefinitely is costly for the client and creatively stifling for the agency. This panel will explore solutions that are most likely to be beneficial to both parties as well as the members of the service they are trying to build: a new plan for launch, propagation and perpetuation.
Your vote will get us to the next round
All of these panels are in the panel picker right now, just waiting for you to register or sign in (free! easy!) and vote for them. If you think these things are worth talking about, please spread the word and rally the troops to make it so. Please also use the comment space on this post or on the panelpicker to share any ideas or links that you think would make these sessions more valuable.
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CyberMummy – tales from the blogging frontline
Saturday saw the first ever conference for parent (mummy) bloggers in the UK: CyberMummy. Set up by the indomitable Sian To, Jennifer Howze and Susanna Scott (aka @mummytips, @alphamummy/@jhowze and @amodernmother), this is a conference that looks set to grow exponentially over the coming year.
© Sian To aka mummytips. '199 mummy bloggers and 1 daddy blogger'
Sian, Jennifer and Susanna met at BlogHer last year in Chicago and decided that a celebration of mummy blogs is exactly what the UK’s bloggers needed. They make a winning combination: with expertise in PR, journalism and grassroots community building, these three mummy bloggers have Read full post
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Guardian #Activate2010
Yesterday, I was lucky enough to attend The Guardian’s Acvtivate2010 Summit, which is dedicated to looking at how the Internet is changing the world. The focus seemed to be very much on global good. Props need to go to Robin Hough, Head of Media Events and his team for packing in some of the most fascinating and inspiring speakers into a single day. Although it was fairly exhausting, it was worth being exhausted for.Here are a few themes that stood out for me.
Do what you’re passionate about and the money will come naturally – This sentiment was most convincingly posited by Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital but the living embodiment of this was Jamal Edwards of SBTV who started a YouTube channel devoted to urban culture after receiving a video camera for Christmas when he was 17. Now at the grand old age of 19 he’s turning down TV spots from MTV and others because he wants to stick with the Internet and the ad revenue he receives for his content on YouTube. Jamal didn’t start by wondering how he was going to make money out of it, he simply loves creating content for people to enjoy. Julie’s main point was “Don’t try and be the next Google, just do what you’re good at”. This might seem common sense to most but to really put your effort where your passion is isn’t easy for everyone.
Money fuels the engine of social good – Many agreed on the fact that ideas are useless without actions and actions cost money, therefore ideas need to make money. Simple really, but there was a sense that philanthropy isn’t going to save the world alone. A far more sustainable approach is to create businesses that help society but pay for themselves while they’re doing it. Sustainability in every sense. We can’t rely on generosity alone.
Don’t assume anything about those in need – Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices told us about 1million shirts, an utterly terrible idea for social good that was almost set to destabilise the second-hand clothes trading market. Through some harsh exchanges, the organiser was introduced by Teddy Ruge, a prominent blogger and social entrepreneur in Uganda. After a rocky start they are starting to collaborate on something that makes much more sense. This is really a larger point about collaboration, co-creation and empathy being vital aspects of creation of solutions for those in need. We need to stop trying to fix problems that don’t exist.
The web is increasing our ability to empathise – Ethan proposed that just as transport made the world feel smaller, the Internet is making us cosy up close. And when people begin talking they start to understand one another better.
We’re still leaving people behind – Britain’s Digital Champion Martha Lane-Fox was driving home the inclusion agenda on various panels. Right now, in the UK there are 10m people that have never used the Internet. The people that can benefit most from the Internet are still missing out. One of the most poignant quotes was supplied by Martha regarding her experience when introducing someone to the web for the first time – “I didn’t realise I had such an enquiring mind”. See Martha’s Race Online 2012 project for more on this.
Talkers v.s. Doers – Doers WIN. Well, 9/10 times they fail, but failing is winning right?
Mobile technology is leapfrogging in the developing world – Georgia Arnold from MTV and Jan Chipchase from Frog Design (formerly of Nokia) both touched on the way in which mobile phones have overtaken other technologies such as TVs and PCs and err… indoor toilets* in developing countries and therefore mobile, SMS and WAP all present an enormous amount of potential. But again, Jan was keen to stress the problem of exclusion.
Some priceless soundbites from the day:
- “If I could download a handbag, I would” Bridget Minamore, contributor to Livity
- “We learn by copying, so why is it illegal?” Peter Sunde, Flattr (formerly Pirate Bay)
- “The music industry isn’t in a bad place, it’s thriving, it’s the record industry that is suffering” Peter Sunde
- “We have free art galleries but people still pay millions for art at Christies” Harriet Thomas, iCaring
This is a top-line for now, I will hopefully break out some of the more interesting talks and do full posts on them, so you know, stay tuned.
This event and its predecessor has been such a success that they will be taking it to the US in December and are considering extending it to two days next year. I heartily recommend it.
*Georgia Arnold claimed that 70% of young Kenyans use social media, 80% have mobile phones – only 53% have an indoor toilet. Personally, if I lived in a small, very hot house I probably wouldn’t want an indoor toilet either.
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Designing for Collaboration: Reward and Reputation Systems
One of my favourite talks at SXSW was by Andy Baio from Kickstarter, called Gaming the Crowd. Andy spoke about designing for increased participation through reputation systems. In fact, he killed the wonderful myth I had that leaderboards rock. Apparently they don’t, because if you’re not in the top 10, you’re disincentivised to participate.
Leaderboards aren’t always fun
There was a phase when I played Crazy Taxi (now called Crazy Cabbie) on Facebook and the mere sight of that leaderboard would make me grit my teeth and want to somehow beat whichever friend of mine was on top (I have since stopped playing it, having taken voluntary retirement from the game because I saw I was becoming obsessed, which is another thing Andy spoke about). The benefit there was that there were two kinds of leaderboards for that game – one that was relevant to you because it included your friends who were playing the game, and the other a global one which was really not much use because a) you didn’t know the people who had the high scores there and b) usually their scores were way higher than your top friends’ scores, so much so that there was no way you’d be able to get that far – so you didn’t bother. Or, in other words, it was disincentivising me, except I didn’t realise it at the time. In general, in MMOs, it is in the interest of the game to ensure people don’t burn out, according to Andy, and leaderboards often result in that, as they did with me.
Farmville, now the largest MMO in the world with 82 million players, taps some key behavioural psychology traits to keep players addicted to it. One, reciprocity. If you do something for someone, they are motivated to do something for you. Two, loss aversion. When you own something, even if it is virtually, some bit of you wants to see it prosper. Three, set collection. Many of us must have experienced this as children: collecting and bartering cards to complete a set, like Pokemon cards, or dipping deep into the recesses of my memory, WWF card sets (yeah, thanks to my cousins, I actually participated in trading pictures of wrestlers at one point!).Knowing when to step back
Sometimes the whole competition system gets out of hand. Andy mentioned the example of a lady who plays Xbox 360 who buys and plays games she doesn’t even like, just to beat people at them. Andy himself was part of a similar situation on Foursquare where a friend and he were locked in a competition with a third unknown person over the Mayorship of a cafe. They started resorting to checking in in the bathroom to get to the top, which really is a bit insane, as he acknowledged! (Overall though, he did say Foursquare had got the reward mechanism sorted out quite well).
Right and wrong reward systems
A key issue while designing games is to figure out how to make people happy. Games that use feelings of guilt to reinforce behaviour are wrong, and Andy gave a good example of a site that is really ‘evil’, as he calls them: Swoopo.
Swoopo is an auction site where every bid raises the price of an item by 12 cents, but also increases the time the auction will be open for by upto 20 seconds. So once you spend, say, $20, you’ll feel compelled to go on bidding to win the item because you will believe that it is right within your reach – and for every bid, the site makes money. They even have something called the ‘Bid Butler’ which places bids on your behalf! According to Andy, a site like Swoopo takes advantage of the inherent irrationality in human beings – of the gaps in the way we think.
Making fun part of everything you do
Someone in the audience asked a very interesting question after the talk: how can we make work more fun using reputation systems? Andy’s response was that anything that you measure – or teach – can be made into a game. Even something like editing a Word document. Imagine if you got points for every error you found in a Word document – wouldn’t that make you want to pay even more attention to what you were doing, rather than seeing it as a chore?
My favourite use of reputation systems and leaderboards in a work environment by far is the one that Panic Inc in Portland, OR have to display the status of their projects in-house. I so wish we had one as awesome as that here at Made by Many. Take a look:
One of the most valuable takeaways for me was this simple lesson, though:
Design your project in order to foster collaboration.
That should be the guiding principle. Think about how you can bring people together, and how you can do it in a fun way that makes them want to come back to your site/game.
Kickstarter is in itself a great example of that. It is one of our favourite sites here at Made by Many. Lovely, clean design, bold text, a clear indication of what is going on within different projects, and a motivation to go back and see how a project is faring if you’ve invested in it.
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We’re hiring
We’re looking for a few people to join us and so we’re asking about to see if anyone knows anyone. We need some creative geeky types with an obsession for the new Web who like making things.
Recently, someone in the office asked, “Who here was the last person to be picked for a team in the school playground?” Around half the company put their hands up – and that’s the kind of freaks we’re interested in meeting.
If you’re interested in finding out more please email us on jobs@madebymany.co.uk.
There are several of different roles:
- And we also need developers with Ruby on Rails, XHTML/CSS/JavaScript and the Photoshop skills – I think we’re looking for ninja levels of skill in this respect
If you know anyone who fits the bill please send them our way. Thanks.
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A Few Quick Questions: Pete Cashmore at SXSW 2010
Right before South By, we sent a few SXSW-related questions over to Pete Cashmore of Mashable for him to answer. Mashable is one of the sites people both from within and outside the social media industry regularly refer to and read. In the 5 years since Pete founded Mashable in 2005, it has grown to gather a readership of 10 million unique users every month. Here’s what Pete thought of (and was up to) at South By this year:
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1. Has Mashable been at SXSW every year since 2005? How have you seen it evolve?
My first SXSW was in 2008. Since then the Interactive part has grown dramatically — that’s a great sign for the industry, but it also means it’s a challenge to meet all the interesting people! Interactive also includes a more diverse range of people now, including those who got into social media by way of traditional media, marketing or advertising. That’s great for Mashable, since that’s the audience we write for.
2. What is the one panel/session you definitely do not want to miss this year, and why?
I organized interviews and meetings throughout, so I unfortunately didn’t have masses of time for panels. However, I did participate in a panel on crowdsourcing called Crowd Control. We spoke about how media companies can add crowdsourced content in a way that adds value, and posed the question: “is crowdsourcing a fad, or will it change media forever?”. The audience voted overwhelmingly for the latter.
3. We’re sure you attend plenty of conferences and tech events every year. What makes SXSW special to the Mashable family?
SXSWi is the one place where everyone in tech comes together — people from all over the US, Europe, and even Australia and New Zealand make the trip. That makes it a melting pot from which the future of the web emerges.
4. Name one thing you’re sure will happen at Mashable’s MashBash this year :)
A geek dance-off in the early hours of the morning (and it did!).
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Thanks for taking the time to answer these, Pete! Hopefully we’ll see you next year.
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Transient permanence
In amongst all the digital talk at SXSW there was one panel that felt very analogue. In fact, it was about physical things. Titled “Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design” or “Get excited and make things”.
The panel took turns to present some of their projects which by and large involved creating physical, printed objects. Yeah, print. That dirty, high-friction mechanism for disseminating information.
Chris Heathcote kicked things off with a core argument that ‘puter screens are inherently boring and mundane and that ‘digital’ is natural and not special anymore. He used Russell Davies’s term ‘post-digital’ which is about moving screen experiences into the real world.
Michal Migurski of awesome-ists Stamen Design described his work for Open Street Map (OSM) project - Walking Papers. This allows people to download portions of the map, print it out and draw on edits. They can then use this, once scanned back in, to make micro-level edits to the online maps.
James Bridle talked about his own publishing exploits, creating a fieldnotes book for his trip to SXSW which included maps, notes pages and the conference schedule. In one project he created a book containing all of his tweets from a two year period packaged in a classical-looking hardback tome. Cute.
The panel presentations finished up with Ben Terrett of Really Interesting Group talking about their Newspaper Club. This is a web-based service allowing anyone to set up and print their own newspaper. They’ve already created loads, take a look at their blog.
The session finished by giving out a limited edition paper to all attendees.
Photo courtesy Ben Terrett under Creative Commons
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Existentialism and flamethrowers at SXSWi
At SXSWi, I was expecting to be sold the shiny digital future, but what I found was something stranger and unsettling, somewhere fragmented, confused. Is the web getting a bit existential?
After its angry adolescence, the web is growing up and beginning to realise that its parents possibly aren’t total bellends. To bludgeon the metaphor, you could say that after totaling the car, smashing up the house and pissing in the pool, the web and its pilgrims are expressing a growing awareness fear of the consequences of all this youthful abandon.
Jaron Lanier spoke of the internet’s inability to let us forget those teen embarrassments. Could Jack Kerouac have gone on the road if he’d had a FaceBook page knocking about with his embarrassing old teen identity? ‘Dignity is the opposite of real time’. Will we lose the ability to reinvent ourselves and move on, having spent so much time nurturing our teen status online?
Other panels were concerned about us forgetting our loopy teenage years as the pressures of the market starts to reel in all that carefree recklessness. The brilliant ‘What We Learned Watching Kids with Homemade Flamethrowers’ (with @Tim Hwang and @Sawyer Carter Jacobs) celebrated micro-genres, but raised concerns about their survival. These tiny communities producing “the dark matter in the belly of YouTube“, the “genesis of culture” on the web, are threatened because brands can’t easily monetise this kind of dangerous, illegal or utterly bland content, so why store so much of it? (There’s 25.2 hours of homemade flamethrower movies on Youtube).
‘Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design‘ explored the physical manifestations of memory, from James Bridle’s book of his own tweets made permanent as a personal history to The Newspaper Club, which rapidly distributes web content in a printed format perhaps more suited to temporal physical social distribution (handing it out). Projects like these give us something that digital cannot provide… souvenirs.
Wrapping it up. Bruce Sterling’s closing keynote focussed on the responsibility of coming of age, pondering if the web and its creators now face the real challenge of re/building the business models and social structures they/it so easily broken down over the last few years. His point seemed to be, so that real the digital natives don’t hate their parents (that’s us) when they grow up.
For me SXSWi was a new experience, but what I learned was that the digital-o-sphere is becoming rich and complex. It knows it’s a thing in the world and the world is full of other things and not all of them are rubbish in comparison. Maybe it’s finally becoming somewhere that can handle culture (art, masterpieces?) that isn’t just buffoonery.
as @karlmarx put it..
‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.’
I mean, who couldn’t ponder the meaning of existence sat behind these dudes?
Yellow coats
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It’s a wrap. SXSW over… ’til next year.
I wrote a week or so ago about what I wanted to get from South by South West.
Now it’s all over, the hangover has faded but the jetlag is lingering longer than would be ideal, there are a few observations from my first sxsw that I would like to share.
The standout moment for me was Clay Shirky’s talk “Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data.” He captivated the audience for an hour, weaving together seemingly unrelated topics and themes (underwear, weather balloons, spherical trigonometry, Napster and the printing press, amongst others). He created a beautifully articulate argument for how abundance breaks more things than scarcity and raised the question around how much value we can get out of civic sharing.
He even managed to answer some terminally dull, laborious questions with wit and create an interesting point where there was, seemingly, nothing to say. Clever.
As I tweeted at the time, the best presenters are great story tellers. Clay Shirky is an awesome story teller. He also wore a three wolf moon t-shirt for extra awesomesauce™.
I was probably not the only person to leave that auditorium wanting to be a better public speaker.
I think one of the reasons his talk went down so well was that he went very deep into the subject. I found some of the panels merely skimmed the surface and left many people wanting more – which they often found by leaving the session. Either the participants judged their audience wrong or were, dare I say it, guilty of inadequate preparation.
As someone said on Twitter – it’s all a bit Russian roulette with the sessions. Apparently, it always has been.
You’d expect Keynotes to be the pinnacle of the conference though. The interview of Evan Williams, founder of Twitter, was one that fell way short of the mark. It was a weak interview that led to a queue to leave the enormous room. The back channel was alive with protestations at the dullness of it all. Here’s a compilation of just some of our chat.
Poor old Eliot Van Buskirk who had to follow up with an interview of Daniel Ek, CEO and co-founder of Spotify, 24 hours later was visibly nervous as he took to the stage; conscious of an audience that wasn’t afraid of giving its tweets some teeth. But he made a much better fist of the interview than Umair Haque did of his session with Williams. His questions were more pointy and we actually gleaned some information from the interview. Like, for example, Spotify having 320,000 paying subscribers, 100 million playlists – 30% of which being complete albums – laying waste to the myth that the album as a format and concept is dead.
Those panels that did dive deep were a pleasure to listen to, even if at times it was an individual holding the whole thing together. Johnny Lee of Microsoft – Applied Sciences talked, like Shirky, eloquently and concisely when discussing ‘new interaction paradigms’ (first prize for buzzword bingo). His piece was littered with a number of nuggets of detail and insights – fired off too quickly to get down. Will be hunting down the session video when it is available later in the year.
As a side point. How come I’ve heard a number of tremendously switched-on people from Microsoft talking about their work with some awesome advances in computing technology? What’s the barrier between the output of these visionaries and the marketplace? I think that company needs a few more people like Johnny Lee and Blaise Aguera y Arcas and less Balmers.
It’s also worth mentioning Ze Frank’s session. Never mind him working in a parallel universe, I think it’s probably more tangential. He talked about some of the things he’s done over the years exploring human emotions. I took a lot more away from this session than James. Yes, what he does is disposable and often whimsical. But some of it, I feel, provides a real insight into human emotions and he has a great knack of turning a sterile digital space into something quite emotionally charged. His thought patterns, work rate and variety are startling. He makes me want to do more.
But, as Tim says, SXSW is as much about the people you meet. The parties were excellent, the conversation inspiring, Twitter avatars we brought to life and to be frank I can’t f***ing wait ’til 2011.
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Lazy panels and lazy tweeting
Lazy panels and lazy tweetingI’ve just come out of the SXSW Evan Williams keynote. Although there was the odd glimpse of wisdom (and a vaguely interesting announcement about the @anywhere service) I didn’t manage to get to the end of the session. I held out for as long as I could, but I soon joined the flood of people leaving the room.@conradlisco sums it up better than I can:<tweet>The same happened yesterday afternoon. Jon Gruber and Jim Coudal were running a session called ‘Online advertising: the race to the bottom.’ Cool title and a great opportunity to discuss the future of advertising and how we can sell different approaches to display advertising to our clients.Unfortunately this isn’t what we heard. Instead we got a rather too cosy fireside chat:<tweet>Here are two people on stage completely fluffing a panel. An audience that started off as being completely engaged slowly losing interest in the topic and (unfortunately) respect for the people on stage.Faux conversationsThe two people having a staged conversation seems to have been very popular this year at SXSW. Well, amongst the panellists at least. To me it comes across as an incredibly lazy way of presenting a session.Instead of a carefully disciplined and structured presentation that has a point and a message, the audience are treated to banter and discussion. Often the key themes and over riding message is lost in soporific chat. The advantage seems to be all with the panel – no time consuming keynote slides to prepare, no time spent agonising over which points you want to make or the structure of your presentation. The panellists can just wing it as they go along and see what happens. Usually to the detriment and disappointment to the audience.This is a format that *could* be made to work. Imagine if we were to add a dissenting view to the panel. Rather than two friends who are exactly on the same page (desperately feeding each other lines) how about two people from different sides of the argument? In the online advertising panel for example, someone from a big display house ad versus the creator of a small independent ad network. Someone who believes in slapping as may ad formats on a page versus someone who thinks that publishers should put value on their content and limit ad inventory?Disagreement, discussion, argument, dissent. Surely more can be learnt (and communicated) through debate than a mere chat?Follow that damn #hashtagCould Gruber and Coudal have changed the direction of their panel as it happened? Whilst the set up of the panel meant there wasn’t the scope for dissent, could they have least recognised that the audience was getting frustrated?Of course an astute presenter has a feel for the mood of the room through all those micro body ticks the audience are sending out – sighs and crossing and re-crossing legs. At an extreme level of course this manifests as people walking out of the room…There’s a gapingly obvious way of measuring the audience opinion. I’ve shown a couple of tweets on this page showing the reaction to a panel in real time. Why can’t the panel follow the panel’s hashtag and change the trajectory of the talk as it goes?The amount of times that I’ve sat in a session recently and thought the panel are in a different head space from the audience – unfortunately in some cases it’s as if the panellist has their head in a bin, ignoring everything that’s happening around them.Why not use Twitter to not only gather questions from the audience but also to gauge the mood and react accordingly? If two people are on stage it doesn’t take long for one of them to scan a twitter stream and act quickly.Please, just ask the questionPanels end with a question and answer session. Actually they end with a ‘personal bio, company spiel, long winded project introduction, question’ and answer session.Whilst members of the audience introducing themselves to the floor can provide valuable context to a question, sometimes it comes across as self aggrandisement. We’re interested in what you have to ask, but at the end of the day, we’re more interested in what the panel has to say…I’ve just come out of the SXSW Evan Williams keynote. Although there was the odd glimpse of wisdom (and a vaguely interesting announcement about the @anywhere service) I didn’t manage to get to the end of the session. I held out for as long as I could, but I soon joined the flood of people leaving the room.
@conradlisco sums it up better than I can:
The same happened yesterday afternoon. Jon Gruber and Jim Coudal were running a session called ‘Online advertising: the race to the bottom.’ Cool title and a great opportunity to discuss the future of advertising and how we can sell different approaches to display advertising to our clients.
Unfortunately this isn’t what we heard. Instead we got a rather too cosy fireside chat:
Here are two people on stage completely fluffing a panel. An audience that started off as being completely engaged slowly losing interest in the topic and (unfortunately) respect for the people on stage.
Faux conversations
The two people having a staged conversation seems to have been very popular this year at SXSW. Well, amongst the panellists at least. To me it comes across as an incredibly lazy way of presenting a session.
Instead of a carefully disciplined and structured presentation that has a point and a message, the audience are treated to banter and discussion. Often the key themes and over riding message is lost in soporific chat. The advantage seems to be all with the panel – no time consuming keynote slides to prepare, no time spent agonising over which points you want to make or the structure of your presentation. The panellists can just wing it as they go along and see what happens. Usually to the detriment and disappointment to the audience.
This is a format that *could* be made to work. Imagine if we were to add a dissenting view to the panel. Rather than two friends who are exactly on the same page (desperately feeding each other lines) how about two people from different sides of the argument? In the online advertising panel for example, someone from a big display ad house versus the creator of a small independent ad network? Someone who believes in slapping as may ad formats on a page versus someone who thinks that publishers should put value on their content and limit ad inventory?
Disagreement, discussion, argument, dissent. Surely more can be learnt (and communicated) through debate than a mere chat?
Follow that damn #hashtag
Could Gruber and Coudal have changed the direction of their panel as it happened? Whilst the set up of the panel meant there wasn’t the scope for dissent, could they have least recognised that the audience was getting frustrated?
Of course an astute presenter has a feel for the mood of the room through the micro body ticks the audience are sending out – sighs and crossing and re-crossing legs. At an extreme level of course this manifests as people walking out of the room…
I’ve shown a couple of tweets on this page showing the reaction to a panel in real time. Why can’t the panel follow the panel’s hashtag and change the trajectory of the talk as it goes?
The amount of times that I’ve sat in a session recently and thought the panel are in a different head space from the audience – unfortunately in some cases it’s as if the panellist has their head in a bin, ignoring everything that’s happening around them.
Why not use Twitter to not only gather questions from the audience but also to gauge the mood and react accordingly? If two people are on stage it doesn’t take long for one of them to scan a twitter stream and act quickly.
Please, just ask the question
Panels end with a question and answer session. Actually they end with a ‘personal bio, company spiel, long winded project introduction, question’ and answer session.
Whilst members of the audience introducing themselves to the floor can provide valuable context to a question, sometimes it comes across as self aggrandisement. We *are* interested in what you have to ask, but at the end of the day, we’re more interested in what the panel has to say…
What are your thoughts of how panels should be run? More debate? Less questions? I’d be interested to know what you think.
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