IWMW10 Remote BarCamp

So I’ve lost my voice and have had a maximum of 15 hours sleep over the last 3 days but nevermind, this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop seems to be going really well!

I’ll write more about the exciting stuff we got up to when I’ve recovered but one innovation I wasn’t expecting was a remote BarCamp facilitated by our excellent Live Blogger Kirsty Pitkin (was McGill).

The CoverItLive Interface for the Remote BarCamp

As Kirsty explains on the IWMW blog:

This year we held our first online BarCamp, especially for our remote audience. The session attracted 21 viewers, including 7 active and talkative participants! We had representatives from Washtenaw Community College, Michigan USA, University of Huddersfield, Heriot-Watt University, a former employee from the UK Centre for Legal Education, (now freelancing in Denmark!) and Oxford University.

Kirsty used the event live blog (CoverItLive) as the ‘venue’ for the BarCamp and participants could name themselves or remain annonymous.

For the BarCamp, I disabled the feed from the #iwmw10 hash tag, which effectively gave us a clear discussion space without the tweets from delegates in other BarCamp sessions. I invited participants to introduce themselves and to suggest topics of interest for discussion. As each person introduced themselves, I granted them unmoderated posting on an individual basis to enable freer flowing discussion.

I think what Kirsty was doing with her remote BarCamp follows the lines of the OU Online Conference.

We have to offer more support for remote participants, budget cuts and environmental issues mean they may well make up the largest percentage of the audience in the future.