Blogs & Wikis For Conference Communication (ASIST 2006)
I’m in the blogs & wikis workshop at ASIST, I’m speaking in a few minutes, but I also wanted to share my notes.
Wiki page for Blogs & Wikis Workshop on the ASIST 2006 Wiki
The first thing we did was introduce ourselves, I added everyone in the audience to the wiki page. Shanshan Ma from Drexel mentioned that she’s working on a dissertation topic involving cooperative blogs (also CIO, CEO blogs).
Important question, why are Pretzels so popular as conference snacks?
Meredith Farkas
We watched Meredith Farkas’ presentation as a Flash screencast, it worked really well and the presentation was great. Meredith gave a good introduction to the topic and her experience mirrors a lot of the other presenter’s experiences.
Charles Livermore
Charles echoed Meredith’s experience, and then shared is experience with PBwiki. PBwiki is nice because getting a wiki up and running is so freaking easy.
Heather Morrison
Talked about her experience running a group blogs for libraries in British Columbia.
Beatrice Pulliam
Stephen mentioned how he learned about ASIST through the ASIST 2005 blog, and how he felt that they were a good tool both for reinforcing an existing community but also to expand the community by acting as outreach tool.
The blog and wiki for ASIST 2005 were developed independently, and there was concern that they were competing for attention. It seems to me that blogs and wikis solve different problems for conference communications, but they do divide the user’s attention.
An interesting comment/question came up about students who felt uncomfortable posting to a class blog because of exposure. Would people feel more comfortable participating if the wiki/blog was protected and only available to participants? Is the ability to allow anonymous editing and posting enough?
Lixin asked some more fundamental questions, and I realized that we’ve missed some important groundwork: * Can search engines see the content in the wiki or blog? * How to people know when new information is available?
Brad Hemminger
Interested in scholarly communications, and in particular how we can use wikis (less so blogs) to comment and provide feedback on scholarly work. Also, how can we use these tools to “pre-conference” — that is, extend the conference discussion before the conference happens so that it can be more reactive to the audience.
Paul Jones asks people to ask questions before the conference.
Heh, Brad talked about me 
KT mentioned that she thought the wiki was a really good tool for extending the official proceedings by allowing presenters to share updated and new content (even whole slideshows).
Miguel did warn that you need to be careful about content on a wiki. Publishers are very picky about where information is published, and sharing pre-press information on a wiki can be considered “prior publication”. Which also forces us wiki advocates to admit that open wikis are a potential source of plagiarism. Less of a problem, though many people seem to think it is, is that other people can edit your content. This does happen, but is really the essence of the wiki model. Its up to the wiki maintainers to decide what their policy will be.
Shanshan mentioned that they have found evidence that frequently updated blogs are more popular. People like to see fresh information on the homepage. Wikis don’t have this problem.
Jackson Fox
Deborah Swain challenged me on the idea that most users don’t need all of the tools that MediaWiki provides. I still think that the majority of wikis don’t need these tools. They may be needed for really large communities, but for smaller ones, its overkill. BUT, maybe removing those tools means taking away too much. Maybe even small communities can find uses for the tools in MediaWiki. I’m not sure.
Stephen Francoeur
Stephen talked about the “info environment” the surrounds a conference: wikis, blogs, technorati, flickr, email lists, etc. He also talked about the lifetime of the conference info environment. Good metaphor: knitting information together. As a conference outsider, the info cloud makes one feel a part of the community, and allows one to find out what was said.
Heh, he just complained about the IA of most wikis. I think this is a valid argument.
Both Stephen and Brad talked about how conference wikis need better marketing so that the community can find these things. If they don’t find it, they won’t participate.
Is there such a thing as conference wiki/conference blog burnout?
People should use Technorati tags more often.
Deborah Swain
People won’t share if there isn’t trust.
How can we use blogs and wikis to advance the conversation before the conference? If we can do this, can we change the structure of the conference itself? We want to move away from the dim room and slides to promoting democratic conversations. Knowledge Cafe, something like an unconference.