I hope edayz went well – we were pleased to be able to support the event by meeting the airfare of Nancy White from the US to Oz.

Here’s what we’ve done the last few years – I’ll come to 2009 shortly as it was a bit different….

We open a Ning a couple of months before the conference to start the dialogue. This is open to anyone – not just delegates. We let it manage itself – but prompt it a bit from time to time to get people participating. See this at: http://lt2009.ning.com/

We ask all delegates to tell us who will be blogging & aggregate this – interesting that there were very few blogs this year – a sign of the times??? See this at: http://www.netvibes.com/lt2009

We have one person dedicated to using CoveritLive. Others in the audience may be doing the same but we publicise our ‘official’ person – see this at: http://mizminh.wordpress.com/

We use Twitter as the back channel & start tweeting before the event & let all delegates know prior what the #tag is. This year we publicised twubs as the aggregator – see: http://twubs.com/lt2009 (Last year we used twemes which is good because of the flickr & delicious feeds – but a bit slow at updating.)

This year we had a treasure hunt going & used Posterous as the platform for posting. See: http://lt2009.posterous.com/

We also have a YouTube channel which will have all of the ‘flipumentaries’ uploaded as soon as I get time See: http://www.youtube.com/learntechconf

In the past we’ve provided a link to the vodcasts & podcasts as soon as we can – this is usually at the end of the day for various reasons. Our streaming is managed by JPL Media who give an excellent service & have supported the LT conferences for many years now. This means that this aspect is in the hands of a professional & I don’t need to worry about it.

This year, for the first time, we live streamed. We’ve not done this in the past due to lack of bandwidth – so we went all out this year & installed even more bandwidth than usual. We agonised about whether to charge for this service & decided that we would – for a couple of reasons… Firstly – as someone mentioned above – it’s seems unfair to those who have paid to be there that the rest of the world is getting access to the sessions at the same time as they are – at no cost. Secondly – and a little cunningly – I wanted to limit the number of people on the live feed as I wasn’t sure how well we could moderate a lot of questions coming in from remote sites. The need for payment effectively did this for us. All of these streams will be made public in a few weeks – in fairness to those who have paid they’ll be delayed a little this year. Podcasts were made available daily.

We put the links to all of this on the website under the ‘Extras’ tab. (Couple of links to come yet this year!!!)

We routinely have speakers AND delegates sign off on their photograph, video etc etc being recorded & made available on the web. For delegates there are some sign off boxes on the online rego form so we have this on record & ditto for speakers at the acceptance stage.

I don’t attempt to do any of this myself – I act as the ‘manager’ over everything & try to make sure that everything is running smoothly. We have wonderful team members who work like crazy during the event just on the social media side.

I’m not concerned about driving people to the conference website re clicks etc – I’d much prefer people were adding stuff on their own websites, blogs, wikis etc etc – this is all good (free) publicity.

Hope this has helped with your deliberations.

Cheers

I am also really interested in this discussion, particularly how to have open access while monetising content, not an easy question!

One of the models I am thinking about is offering free live access but have the archived materials sitting on a low cost subscription website, any thoughts?

John
http://www.onlinevents.co.uk
http://www.wilsoncounselling.co.uk

event webcasting, blended events & event networking is a big part of what we do. my interest is to help with feedback from the organisers that we work with that want to engage their online audience along with their venue based audience. happy to share knowledge and would be very interested to hear your views.

thanks

julian

a whole other thread/rant about social norms, expectations and the danger of open mic in public places

You know me, that I am more commercially focussed than most in the ed-tech world. I reckon it’s great that people explore business models that work for the Read-Write web. But…

There are a couple of fundamental properties of online social media we can’t ignore:

1. Social media is un-controllable! (relying on counting downloads from a single server falls foul of this)

2. Value-subtraction pisses networks off! (charge for services/experiences that ADD value, dont charge for stuff that is usually freely available)

Have a zillion ideas to work through, reckon we should record a little skype chat and share it with the world (for free, pass it forward style…). If I haven’t booked a time to do this by the end of next week, please nag me (tad overloaded at the mo…)

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Measurement of downloads is just one aspect of what I’m talking/thinking about. There are issues to do with agreements with presenters that perhaps need to encompass live streaming and a sense of fair’s fair at the fair in terms of how content that costs others time and money to create is used and attributed by others.

I wonder if these and what other issues are the reasoning behind the Learning Technologies conference charging significant dosh for online participation – http://www.learningtechnologies.com.au/index.cfm?action=registration

So I think it behooves those of us who provide services and expertise to make online participation possible to think through these issues and help conference organisers to see the value in making information freely available.