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.

I’ve been there and I haven’t written about it, yet. It’s all to do with the hectic days/weeks before, and the food poisening afterwards.

Now I’m back on track and ready to share some of the joy of THE conference. Some pics to start.

Wednesday, (p)reboot day

Interview with Peter for In Full Flow in Malmö.

Thursday, Reboot day 1

Ton is personal sponsor this year

I didn’t carry my laptop around for a change.

Friday, Reboot day 2.

No conference swag this year, instead we Rebooters divided the money over several project.

The most interesting discussions took place in the locker rooms (wish I were there)

Saturday, PAN-party

Henriette’s coworkingboatPAN-project

I have so much footage to process now

All pictures: Ton