We’ve tried various ways of building conference communities online in the past, and most have relied on a third party site. And usually these sites have followed a sort of bizarro Pareto rule — for the 20% of the product that integrated a twitter feed or flickr gallery the other 80% forced and encouraged the typical walled garden approach. Whatever integration was just sweetener to get another signup.
This time we’ve done it a bit differently. Clay Whipkey, our technical director, took the open source conference system we are using to post schedules, sponsors and paper lists, and after a week of little sleep, created a plugin for the system that allows the front page to aggregate all #ocwcglobal2009 material from all blogs indexed by Google, all flickr pages, tweets, etc. And as an added bonus it is lightly integrated with the Cloudworks system (though right now that integration is limited by the lack of a lower-level RSS).
You can check it out here. Be gentle with us, there are still some holes on the site, we put it up in the course of one of the longest weeks in my recent memory (while trying to assemble everything from the program to the keynote). There are some holes. There is some missing content.
But all the code that Clay has put into that front page is designed as a plug-in (and will be released after some tweaking), and the base software (which is designed primarily to run registration and the submission review process) is available open source from OCS. Hopefully this is a start to getting people off of Crowdvine and the like, and out of the walled gardens.
(Ignore the login link at the top which is really only for people who are uploading schedules and conference materials).
Anyway, let us know what you thing. And tag related content OCWCglobal2009.
Cool feature, definitely blog about the results and how it worked with your attendees.
Sorry to hear that you found CrowdVine to be a walled garden. I’ve never heard that before, and it’s counter to our goals. We want to create temporary hubs to help attendees have a better conference experience. We try to make it easy to get in through OpenID or aggregation of an existing identity, and easy to get out by letting you export your new contacts to your address book, social network, and feed reader.
I’ve found that if you don’t provide a hub, you end up segmenting the conversation into discrete communities, some of which are walled gardens (Facebook and LinkedIn in particular).
Tony — thanks for your response –
I may be a bit harsh on Crowdvine. Out of all the tech available, we did use Crowdvine for our Logan UT conference, b/c it is more open than other solutions.
Offline I can talk to you about my personal thoughts of why people may have felt a little imposed on by the Crowdvine site in ways we are hoping to avoid here.
If you shoot me an email (after the conference, we’re likely to be bust until Friday) at mike at ocwconsortium.org I’m happy to pass on what feedback I have.