What+happened?

=What happened?=

**Preparations**
I started discussing the different tool and privacy options with the coordinating team, creating specs for the wiki and presenting the different options for privacy settings and pricing plans for the tools. I had already been part of the process of the programme design and including social media aims and logistics alongside the programme.
 * Three weeks before the event**

A letter was sent to all workshop participants inviting them to post a photo and brief profile to the wiki. The event organisers started with their own profiles and photo, modeling an informal style. Over half of the forty nine participants had joined the wiki and entered their profile information before the workshop began. Most of them entered photos. We invited workshop participants to bring computers and digital cameras, and a number of portable computers and cameras were available for anyone who wanted to use them.
 * One week before the event**

On Thursday we arrived to set up the room, prepare the equipment and to do some training of the support team. The room was long and narrow with eight round tables set in an elongated horseshoe facing the long wall of the room. There were two screen projected on the long front wall and one screen projected on the left side wall. Registration took place on the left as you entered the room and the social reporters table was opposite. Steve had a small table with VideoBoo prepared to make the interviews that would appear on the public blog.
 * Thursday**

During the day we discussed the programme and were interviewed by someone from the OU blog. Bev talked with Sue and Wendy about a categorization scheme for the blog posts. We prepared for people to have their photos taken and a system of categories for the blog.

I helped Steve to use the equipment for Videoboo and to edit videos. This took longer than we thought and there was not enough time to prepare with Sue and Wendy.

Friday
As people arrived they had their photo taken to go on the paper for the lily pad. The workshop was introduced and Beverly was also invited to introduce the social media tools. She also talked about issues of privacy. The blog appeared on the screen at the front, with some early posts about what had already happened as people came into the room. The idea was to illustrate how it was going to be used as a running commentary during the workshop days and that anyone was invited to post if they had something to say.
 * Starting**

In the first activity people told their stories in groups as they worked through the lily pads10. As the groups reported back, their stories were recorded. However the stories got quite long and sometimes rather rambling. At the same time we discovered that the internet connection was very slow and the uploading of one video was taking about an hour. Even after the technicians set us up with ethernet cables the upload time was too slow. While the video was uploading it became even slower to upload a photograph and uploading things became rather time-consuming. As I busied myself with the video Wendy took some notes.
 * Slow connection**

After the first activity people were invited to work in “Keepers groups”, where they were given responsibility for one leadership task during the process. There was one group who were “Keepers of output”. The original idea of this group was to have a team of experienced and non-experienced social reporters for the event. However, the discussion in this keepers group centered around finding a definition for “output” and a criticism of online tools in general. Most people at the table had not participated in an event which used social media and of the discussion was an abstract one about the value of social media tools. We decided to set up notice boards in the room with post-it notes, where people could post notices and “tweet” on paper so that the output was not only collected online.
 * Keepers of output**

At the start of the second activity where people were going to work in groups to share boundary stories, Bev made some suggestions for ways the groups could explore boundaries together using the tools we had opened or the recording devices we had brought.
 * Multimedia recording**

Steve, meantime, had recorded an interview on VideoBoo and also discovered the slow upload time. Bev was taking notes for the blog and trying to upload videos and photos, but the process was very slow. Social media tasks can be done much more quickly when the order of tasks is sequential and the multi-tasking is to achieve one task or objective. There were a lot of technology problems, such as those below, arising at the same time.
 * Technology v social reporting**



Everything takes longer to do when you are multi-tasking across multiple objectives. It was not easy to focus on the uploading of stuff, the content of the event, and the use of social media at the same time. This meant that social reporting, in the sense of talking to people and improvising to capture informal insights, had to take second place as the practical demands arose.

Not only were there practical demands, but there was also a flow of interruption from people wanting to know practical issues like where lunch was being served or if they could just - briefly - use the computer for checking emails. With less pressure from technology issues, or with more social reporters, these requests could have been turned into opportunities for social reporting, but they turned out to be interruptions to getting the workflow for the uploading of stuff.

Feedback from participants during the first day was that they were feeling a little confused and having difficulty getting an sense of the overall picture of the content and process of the workshop. The role of social media at this stage was another layer of tension: What were these words flying around - blog, wiki, twitter? What’s the purpose? What are they twittering about us? Shouldn’t it be controlled? How can I make decisions related to them when I don’t understand what they are? At the same time there were some people who were adept at using social media and took its use as an obvious part of the event. And for those who were twittering it was a way to engage in conversations and feel part of communities or “events” that were taking place outside the workshop: what’s the big worry about privacy? There is a tendency among people who use social media to have transparency and openness as the default, which can create a tension when privacy is an issue. This created a boundary between people who know about social media and people who don’t.
 * Day one feedback**

After dinner on the first night all but one of the groups performed a short skit about their shared stories. These were recorded by people who had brought their own cameras or who borrowed one of the social reporting cameras.
 * Evening sketches**

Roundup of output: day one By the end of the day we had written fifteen blogposts and opened a wikipage for each group. We had made around fifty short videos of events during the day and the evening skits. Steve had made a VideoBoo recording of one interview, but as it was taking so long to upload he decided to use text instead.

Saturday
The groups continued to work on their stories during Saturday morning. We opened one wiki page for each group to record their story and prepare their page. Bev helped the groups upload and create their space. For many people this was their first experience of using social media and had to be encouraged to learn that they could do it for them self.
 * Creating wikipages for group output**

Each group then presented their output to the whole group using the wiki page, a video, a powerpoint and a flip-chart (or combinations) to tell their group story and findings.
 * Multimedia group presentations**

The keepers groups also reconvened to reflect on their work as keepers. The keepers of output invited people to write their feedback on the notice boards on the walls: feedback about the workshop and feedback about particular learnings. Later, the social reporting team copied these post-it notes and published them on the blog. The discussion in the group had moved to a more conciliatory tone about social media with some consensus of their contribution to the workshop.
 * Keepers of output reflections**

Videos were given to someone who took them to the PBPL offices across the road to be uploaded to the wiki, so that they would be available for the groups creating their wiki page.
 * Technology issues**

Mike Reed, a participant of the workshop, wrote something in the wiki that reflects some of the feeling about the integration of social media in the event.



On the following Monday the coordinating team reflected on the workshop including the use of social reporting. On an operational level there was a lot of selecting, editing and uploading photographs and videos to the wiki.
 * The weeks following the workshop**

Participants were invited to complete their group page before the wiki was to go public and to add their profile information. I combined this information with people contact information and published it in a PDF document. I would like to have included the participant photographs taken at the start of the workshop, but these were difficult to locate, had not been labeled, and we decided not to. A second document with the text copied from the Wiki profile page was also sent out, with profile pictures and texts that people had entered themselves.

After people had a chance to edit their pages and the wiki went public, I tidied the wiki navigation and content and put the slideshows on Slideshare so they could be viewed inside the wiki. The same thing should be done to the videos which are currently stored in the wiki, but which could be stored in YouTube now that the wiki is public.

About the social reporting document About social reporting Landscapes of Practices workshop Workshop tool preparation Reflections and lessons Closing thoughts
 * Also see:**