ConvergeSouth 2006 recap part 1

October 15, 2006

About all I can *really* say is ‘wow!’. But to expand on that just a little, I’ll try to draft up a bit more of my experiences and some of the inspiring/interesting people I met.

The conference as a whole was great, but just a little short in my mind - I think we could have done one more round of sessions from 3-4:30, and given everyone that much more meat. That’s really about the only piece of constructive criticism I took away - I wanted more!

Elizabeth Edwards was, for lack of a better term, our keynote speaker. Do you really have ‘keynote’ speakers at an ‘unconference’? Perhaps not, but she got things off to a good start. She started off with detailing her experiences with building communities online, and then facilitated discussion and dialogue among the audience for a good 50 minutes, with a tremendous amount of good questions and insights from many people. I had considered proposing a question, but by the time I could formulate it coherently they were wrapping up questions for that session. For the sake of posterity (and perhaps some more discussion here) I’ll post it here too:

What are the technical barriers that need to be overcome to continue to grow the use of blogs and othe social media tools in online community building efforts?

That’s probably my best one sentence effort, but I’ll expand just a bit more. I come from a software/developer perspective, and tend to be a moderately early adopter on many technical issues. But having heard Mrs. Edwards’ experiences in trying to push interactive web sites for her husband’s 2004 campaign, and the pushback she received, I wondered what can be done to make the technology aspect of social software less daunting. I’m not exactly sure her efforts were not supported simply because the tech was ‘too hard’, but I can imagine that *is* a factor in some cases, and I am curious what can be done about it. Better education? Better interfaces? More desktop tools? Integration with more established communications tools?

The next couple sessions were split in to different rooms, so it was a tough choice as to what session to attend. I ended up staying for the “10 steps to a killer blog” session put on by Robert and Maryam Scoble. I was sitting by the elevator when Robert and Maryam got off, and I think I was the first person he spoke to off the elevator. “Hi, I’m Robert,” he said, and I gushed a bit too much, meeting people that famous He looked at my name tag, at which point I realized that none of our name tags had our affiliations on them (company name, blog url, or anything like that). That would probably be my one other criticism of the event. (Later during the afternoon presentation on I also failed to introduce myself and http://webdevradio.com in to the microphone, so for the record the guy talking about the death threats in the Detroit music scene was me!)
Their presentation was good, and as all the presentations went, had a decent amount of interaction with the audience and fostered some good discussions both during and after the event. One attendeed, Sherry Heyl, asked about ‘internal blogging’. Given Scoble’s background and the gist of some previous questions, the topic was addressed from the perspective of normally ‘internal’ employees blogging in public and the issues around that. I wasn’t convinced that was the only thing she had in mind, and she and I spoke in more detail after the session.

As I suspected, she was also looking to get more on the issues surrounding completely ‘internal behind the firewall’ blogging efforts. I was sensitive to this distinction because it’s something I’ve been doing for about a year myself - I simply set up wordpress on an internal server and have kept a more or less daily record of what I’m doing. It’s served a ‘CYA’ purpose, but if everyone in the department would use that as a preferred/additional means of communication, I think our long term communication would be much stronger. The knowledgebase of the entire company is able to grow beyond the limits of individual people much more effectively - at least, that’s my theory right now Some of this is a reaction to stepping in to multiple positions where there was scant documentation left by the people whose roles I was stepping in to. Additionally, having team blogs with real commenting between team members would give a stronger sense of historical context when reviewing past decisions.

Back to the recap. We broke for lunch for about an hour. Lunch was sponsored by ‘payperpost.com‘. Thanks guys. I *think* people thought there would be more of a backlash against them, but there wasn’t. It was greatly appreciated, and I’m not sure too many people there really had an issue with their business model, although they do tend to have some vocal critics.

I’m realizing I have much more to write than I can reasonably address right now - I’d like to give a few more topics their due, and make sure I’m not forgetting anyone I met. I will carry on soon (tonight or tomorrow) with more details and thoughts.

Posted in Blogging, Business, General, Ideas, Media, Software, Travel, Web