I’ve been missing something at Reboot ever since Jaiku and Twitter were introduced: the real backchannel conversations. I call upon all programmers that can bring back conversation to the conference backchannel.
The first webgeek conferences I attented, like BlogTalk 2.0 in 2004 and Reboot 7.0 in 2005 (yes, we added .0 to everything back then), the attendees were divided in two groups: those that had a laptop and those that hadn’t. The first group plugged in their laptop during the event, hooked up to the (often instable and overloaded) wifi and connected to the other websavy’s in the room through IRC and bonjour (mac only, the real websavy’s). The people without laptops were missing out on all the fun us connected lot had, silently *grinning* and ROTFL.
There was some real collective action going on at the IRC backchannel. People would be commenting on the speaker (“Now he’s talking nonsense!”), posting links to resources addressed in the talk, people would start joking when the speaker was too boring to listen to. Sometimes interesting discussions arose. Above all it was transparant what was going on. Everyone that logged in would be able to read everything that would be said and it was a proper way to have conversations.
Reboot was even extra special. Multiple IRC channels were used for the different rooms (A, B and C, how’s that for simplicity). That way you could log in the channel of the room you were in and thus hook up to the other people present in the room, backchanneling without getting distracted by discussions not relevant to what was going on in the room. At the same time you could follow all conversations and sense where something interesting was going on (“This speaker is awesome. Check it out in room C”). People would get up and move to another room, based on such notes.
One anecdote that keeps coming back in the stories I tell, is that during Reboot 7.0 several people in room C (now known as ‘the box’) typed in 42 simultaneously. It was a typical backchannel response to being treated to a slide with a uncomprehensable equation to describe “the value algorithm of human creation” (see picture). Geeky conference as it was, people in the other rooms immediately responded:”So what was the question?”
And then the cool crowd invented Jaiku and Twitter, where you could type in small updates and publish them on a website. Since it was so much easier to subscribe to Jaiku and Twitter than explaining the new cool crowd what IRC is, we started using those services as backchannels.
Instead of logging in to a dedicated channel, we started updating in our own, distributed, often private, channels. After inventing the search and hashtags in Twitter we were at least better able to follow what’s going on, but since they’re microblogging tools the “I” is much more present than the “We”.
With the introduction of Jaiku and Twitter as a backchannel, we unplugged the transparent backchannel conversation. People are not making a collective action in the background. With a tad of melancholy I think back to the times that people would use SubEthaEdit to transcribe the talks realtime and collectively: one typing really fast, others just words behind cleaning up the spelling and publishing it in the conference wiki minutes after a speaker finished talking.
The interaction model of Twitter (sorry to say that Jaiku is no longer in our vocabulary) fails in conversational sense. Jaiku at least featured a proper “post and comment”-form, comments not restricted to 140 characters. It catered for conversation and discussion. Twitter fails in that respect. Using Twitter as a backchannel is cutting out the backchannel conversation.
Call for action
Hereby I want to call upon all webhackers out there to reinvent the conference backchannel. IRC seems to be perfect, but I understand that too many people don’t know how to install a client and how to log in. In terms of functionality, IRC had it all. Log in (under false name if wanted) to a space and instantly start typing, readable to everyone logged in. I envision a dedicated channel so you don’t have to bore your Twitter-followers with not always relevant conference Tweets. A space that actually embraces the online conversational model: many-to-many without a hassle.
You would rock my world if at the next conference I attend (btw, that’ll be SHIFT in Lisbon in October) I’m not stuck with a conversation deprived backchannel.
11 Comments
Let’s working to get that back, I totally agree with that feeling, in a way the experience we had at Reboot 7.0 was never replicated… I still remembered how we collectively managed to gather all the transcripts from the presentations almost in real-time…
Maybe just setting up a web chat channel on the site of the conference would help. (Or on a third party site, if you don’t want to bombard the the conference site).
Well, Jaiku channels work just a good, don’t they?
@tephlon it might be as simple as that, yes
@duarte I think Jaiku channels work better than Twitter #’s. However, but it still means that only people that have or are willing to sign up to the service will join.
Plus: do we actually need such a spacious lay-out for conversations in a backchannel? There’s nothing wrong with just text-based service. And having something without the need of yet another profile and account would lower the threshold for people to join.
The threshold for the original IRC back channels was 1) you needed a client, and 2) you needed access to an IRC server that was stable enough (net-splits anyone?). The power of IRC was that it actually allowed full two-way conversation in the context of the #channel you were using. A channel would serve as ‘chatroom’, a shared space. Anybody inside it was apparantly interested in the event.
With Twitter there is no shared space, and no way to really see the conversation as a group conversation. Upside: more people have accounts.
Can we come up with something that is event/shared space based, so anyone in it is in the same context (which was the big plus of IRC), and at the same time does not require all of us to use the same service, client or make yet another account. Something Roomware / Protonet-like as we saw at Reboot?
So to summarize so far:
- a shared space;
- needs to be stable for use with large groups;
- login without need for account and profile;
- textbased.
Hear, hear! Twitter sucks for real-time conversation. It is indeed a broken conversation model.
I was very disappointed the first time at Reboot (last year?) when I looked in vain for the back channel, and the response I got was “Oh, I guess we’re using Jaiku now”. But it is not the same.
Collaborative notes through SubEthaEdit disappeared at the same time, for some reason.
There was no technical reason for no longer using IRC or SubEthaEdit, as they were as available and functional as before. But Twitter/Jaiku changed something in the collective mindset, which in this regard wasn’t very useful.
So, yes, since it is hard to persuade people to “go back”, we need to come up with some kind of evolutionary leap towards a new form of shared spaces.
Or, more pragmatically, if the Reboot site simply stated in one line where the official IRC backchannel could be found, we’d use it. And, better, if there were an IRC client on the site which one optionally could use, nobody would be barred just because they couldn’t figure out how to install an IRC channel.
Now that I think of it, 2 years ago the IRC back channel was mentioned on the site. Last year it wasn’t. If I should look for a cause, it doesn’t have to go any further than that. People take a hint quite easily, but if there’s no hint, and nowhere to put one, they don’t take it. The Wiki functionality of the Reboot site didn’t seem to work this year or last, so there was no good place to organize something like that.
Somehow I had to recover your comment from the spam-list. Glad I checked it
Your last point, on giving some clues on the conference website is a good one. I passed a similar remark on to Pedro for organising SHIFT. And to introduce people to the backchannel at the beginning of the conference. Something Thomas didn’t do at Reboot this year, either.
Spam list, damn, what could I have said!?!
Anyway, it is a very simple thing. If there’s a door, people are likely to choose to go through it, if they want to get to the other side. If there’s no door, most people will do whatever else is there to do, or what they normally do. Some people will hack the system, if there’s no door where there should be one, but the majority will just put up with it.
It is a big responsibility to lay out the central website for an event. Whatever one does there will set the tone, make certain things possible and other things not possible.
I am not sure I understand – why would we want to invent something which is already there? Irc exists. And the crowd of reboot certainly can handle it, without a problem even from mobile.
Who took that away from you? Nobody. It is just that most people did not wanted to use it and rather had searches on reboot11 on twitter.
Because nowadays, there is more than just the small crowd in CPH which wants to participate, I can’t blame them.
Next time, just convince people to start using IRC again and not Twitter or something else. Heck there are enough ways out there to update both.
Elmine, you practically blame Thomas for “not introducing” it to the crowd – I am sorry, but this is not the consumer passive conference where people need information spoon fed.
Nobody forced you not to use it – but back in the day when the “liveediting” took place, recordings also where scares. I do not want a transcript, I do want the notes people do make on twitter and the interaction through it.
As far as IRC goes – every single one of my machine (except my mobiles) do have IRC setups which have not changed since several years.
Because besides demanding that back, you also neglect to say that if you would bring people there, it would not necessary mean that people would know how to use it nor would they bring back “the good old times”.
If you want that backchannel of your choice to happen, you will have to train and attract the visitors.