The Future of the Internet at the Berkman Center

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:55:00 GMT

I recently attended the Future of the Internet conference at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. I wanted to share a couple thoughts about how the conference used social software to keep everyone organized and connected.

I like how the Berkman Center provided conference attendees with a directory of social tools and related tags that we could use to connect with one another. After the sessions had wrapped up for the day, it was pretty easy to find the content created by conference goers. Conference attendees were live blogging, sending out tweets, uploading photos to Flickr, and even streaming the keynote from their cell phones. The constant tapping on MacBooks and laptops sounded like rain at times.

Here are just a few things I noticed.

The Question Tool. One of my favorite features from the conference was how the question tool was incorporated into the panel discussions. It was a pretty low tech Web application that allowed attendees to submit and comment on questions. The tool was often refered to since it was projected on a screen where it was visible by everyone.

IRC Backchannel. While I didn't use the IRC channel, I saw many people in the audience that were. I liked how at any given time, there were probably 8-10 different types and styles of conversations happening all at once-- some closed like a comment being whispered from one person to another- or quite visible (and searchable) like those conversations happening on Twitter.

The Conference Wiki. During some of the unconference-styled breakout sessions, some of the attendees started adding their notes to the conference wiki. No one asked, they just did it and others followed.

How do you use social software to connect with groups? Have you ever considered giving your customers the ability to connect with one another? Let me know in the comments.

Related Videos:

Benkler and Wales discuss cooperation and commons based peer production.

John Palfrey leads final remarks and questions to think about over the next ten years.

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The Future of the Internet at the Berkman Center