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Back Channel Communication and Twitter
We encourage all conference attendees to participate in back channel communication by actively using Twitter
during the conference this year.
Like many, our initial reaction to Twitter was "It's just a fad. With only 140 characters, you can't say much."
But it can provide a means of near-immediate communication and feedback from others. For those coming to the 2009 HEDW conference,
we encourage you to use this tool, and actively twitter before, during, and after the conference. We believe it will
add value to your conference experience and to others as well.
Setting up an account is free and easy. Just go to www.twitter.com and click on "Get Started -- Join!".
To send a message out about this conference, prepend #hedw to the front of your message.
For instance, if you wanted to twitter a message seeking interest in a walking-wounded (aka birds-of-a-feather) topic, you could twitter:
#hedw Anyone interested in a walking-wounded topic on Kuali Financial Systems?
By using the #hedw hashtag, all the messages about HEDW can be found using a Twitter search RSS feed. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed using your
favorite RSS client.
The RSS-feed URL is:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23HEDW
Why do this?
- Due to tight budgets, attendance at the HEDW conference is down slightly this year. Think of your tweets as sharing your notes not only with
your colleagues in attendance, but also with those who are unable to attend. By sharing your thoughts, reactions and concerns,
others may reply with insight, or at least seek out further discussion.
- If questions come up during a particular session, there is an automatic forum to add comments later and provide followup to these themes.
- The more attendees use it, the more valuable it'll be.
For more on this concept, the following blog posts succinctly explain all the benefits:
http://liveserials.blogspot.com/2009/03/twittering-conferences-public-notes.html
http://www.slideshare.net/paulbaker55/twittering-a-conference
If you are presenting at the conference, here are some considerations with how you could adapt to this "back channel":
http://pistachioconsulting.com/twitter-presentations/
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