Apr
17
Adieu Birmingham, Salut Edinburgh!
April 17, 2008 |
Well the JISC Conference 2008 seemed to go pretty well all told - the huge amounts of work put in by lots of people over months and months all over in a few hours… Well thats no longer quite true. The effort put into the online side has already extended both the reach and span of the event.
Some of the new online stuff (well the stuff I can recall to be honest) includes:
- streamed video (81 for Puttnam, 59 for Beesley), and archived video (59 for Puttnam and 37 for Beesley as of 16 April) via Ustream.
- the Conference web page took 1082 hits in Tuesday 15 April alone
- people posted 112 photos via Flickr
- there were enough mad people to do micro blogging via Twitter to achieve 248 Tweets in the day brought together through Hashtags
- 30 blog posts from sundry people
- James Clay created 6 Qik videos from his phone - thanks for making the effort James!
- and Matt Jukes produced a jaunty little Animoto video now on Youtube
The social networking site for the Conference using Crowdvine seemed to have some success given that it was our first time and we didn’t really have quite enough time to promote it up front and get a buzz going sooner - but it worked and I am sure we’ll do something similar again
In the hustle and bustle of the online stuff its easy to forget that the heart of the conference remains the speakers, the sessions, the exhibition and demo areas and the face-to-face networking that is always valued
The keynotes went well this year, especially Lord Puttnam, and the Angela Beesley set went better than it might have, despite the rather overt puff for Wikia and an unhelpful slap across the JISC face regarding our Wikipedia page … (not sure thats what we paid to come all the way from Oz to do but there we go)
Feedback form the session is generally positive although some still tried to squeeze a quart into a pint pot. We must look at ways of providing some smaller, maybe shorter sessions on more targeted topics next year .
The other success was the demo stands - the project demos worked well, the THE winners got some useful footfall and OSSWatch worked their demo area really well with regular small groups around the stand. Our colleagues from Collections didn’t put in the same effort to their demo area and consequently it ended up as a bit of a lounge area - bit of a lost opportunity it seems to me
Finally the OCLC sponsorship went well and the two organisations clearly have useful overlapping audiences - feedback from OCLC so far is that they were happy with their lot and felt they got value for money - pretty important for a sponsor!
Well next year its all at the Edinburgh ICC which will mean a different type of conference - planning starts Monday
Comments
1 Comment so far
Glad to hear everything went so well at the event in Birmingham.
We look forward to seeing you next year in Edinburgh. I will be looking after your IT requirements at the EICC so we will be talking soon no doubt about all the techniques used this year and working with you to develop them for next year.
Regards
Richard
Client ICT - EICC