See my other posts on #iwmw10: Remotely attending #iwmw10 and Justifying the Web team vs just getting on with it

IWMW 2010, the annual conference for UK university Web teams, has now been and gone. I sat in remotely pretty much according to plan, managing to tweet content! on several occasions, and am now using the Twitter backchannel to catch up on the parallels I like the look of and where was the biggest buzz.  

And it was a conference of tweets (if not...) - statistics from Eduserv's Summarizr tool show a total of 3408 tweets (so far) from 314 twitterers, which given there were around 170 participants in Sheffield can't be bad.

Turbulent times for event organisers

Remote attendance looks set to play an increasing role in higher education events, with details of remote access starting to appear on non-technical conferences as well as those targeted at IT aware audiences - you can tune into a conference on sustainable universities in Bradford today, for example. 

But it's not just about putting up a video stream - the IWMW conference organisers made a big effort to make it is easy as possible for remote participants to engage and feel welcome. There's still a lot to think about here and to learn - an evaluation of the recent OU conference has just been blogged, with a post on how to organise an online conference.

The remote experience

A major argument for facilitating remote attendance is that it saves time and money - both for the organisers and the participant. But is remote attendance an equivalent experience?

One thing which gets mentioned a lot is how difficult it is to maintain concentration in the face of competing demands - it's not the same as taking time out from the day job. Remote attendance calls for a lot of self-discipline - it's more hard work than going on a jolly! And you miss out on the social events and interaction, the informal exchanges and networking which can be the major part of the conference experience.

If you have attended the conference previously and are part of the 'tribe', this is may well be less of an issue, but if you are a complete newbie your participation can feel a bit one way. One way of getting over this disengagement is to have a session specifically for your remote audience - parallel with the physical barcamps the IWMW live blogger gamely facilitated an online barcamp.

Curating the amplification?

There's no shortage of resources from the conference, whatever your channel of choice - plenary videos, slides and blog posts, Flickr and Delicious collections, plus the liveblog archive. In fact, maybe there's too much, and a need now to pull everything together, so it's easy to find out the lessons learned and ideas from each particular session.

The Twitter backchannel captured the more informal side of the conference (maybe there's a need for an #irony tag...), and contributed to its feel good factor, and the live blog worked well to crowdsource ideas, but the conversation moves on, and back at base, is there really time for the follow up? As Joanna Ptolemey puts it, "conversation for conversation sake...can feel like brainstorming or ‘doing stuff’ but it is not action".

But the learning cycle has now been kicked off, the tribe is still tweeting, and doubtless this will continue up to and at IWMW11 - either physically or remotely.