Questions, questions...

[Andy Powell]

Got a question? Feel free to ask it here.

[Andy Powell]

All delegates who are attending the physical event at the BL should have had an email from Ed Barker a while back covering practical issues such as travel and so on. Just in case you've lost the email (or didn't get it in the first place) this info is also available from the symposium Web site. See:

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2008/delegates

[Andy Powell]

Someone has asked us about cloakroom facilities at the venue.

Yes, there is a cloakroom and I'm reasonably confident that they will be able to hold bags and so on as well as coats for people . However, bear in mind that security at the BL is quite tight and any bags you bring with you will probably have to be searched on entry to the venue.

Andy.

[Ade Stevenson]

What are you hoping we'll use this Ning for?

[Andy Powell]

We positioned Ning as a virtual delegate list - a place where people could find out who is coming on the day (physically or virtually) and what their interests are.

Only getting 25% of delegates signed up (so far) probably means we don't have critical mass. This is a shame but is more or less what we expected. I'd be interested in views as to why people don't sign up - but obviously hard to get that here. Too little time perhaps? Or concerns about privacy? Or just not seeing the point? All reasonable reasons I guess.

There is also the possibility of people using Ning to arrange to meet up at the event or whatever, but for a one day symposium I didn't expect much of that to happen (and I was right! :-) ).

[Ade Stevenson]

Guess there's a fair bit or work to do setting up a profile for a one day event - maybe for a 3 day event might make more sense. Having used Crowdvine as a virtual attendee for the JISC conference I'm not entirely sure what I got from it to tell the truth. The video stream of the 2 speakers the most useful really.

I'm impressed you've got Mick Jagger attending.

[Andy Powell]

Re: Mick Jagger - we aim high and expect to be disappointed!

[Mike Ellis]

I think actually seeing faces and putting them to names is a pretty useful thing, if that's all this does. It's interesting looking through the list and seeing lots of people who I have "had contact" with but not actually met. I'm going to change my profile picture accordingly - not like you can tell anything about what I look like, lying on a beach :-)

It'll be interesting to see how much the discussion can/will be continued here on Ning, and how much out in the cloud. Or not at all :-)

[Emma Place]

Since signing up to this Ning thing 2 hours ago two people have got in touch with me about the event via email which has been nice. I also spotted an Intute colleague who will be attending in person so we now have a blogger lined up to report on the event. So I've got something out of it already :-)

[Ade Stevenson]

Agreed it is quite useful as an in advance enhanced delegate list and the photos in partic help to put faces to names before the event.

[Roger Greenhalgh]

That's a really good point... the thing about using photos that are good enough to put names to faces (and vice versa).

I think that if folk wanted to see you lying on a beach (or in my case, standing forlornly in the wilderness with a broken carburetor), they'd click through to a profile. Scanning profiles (and especially blogs) are a sort of compensatory alternative for picking up vibes about the person when you can't use real-contact stuff (like body-language perhaps?) to judge whether you like a person enough to maintain much of a conversation. Or believe in anything they might say, perhaps!

[Jane Stevenson]

I think that its quite useful that you can search members by their interests (although it is not necessarily obvious that you can do this). It might be good to have a means to see more clearly what peoples' interests are - like a tag cloud type thing.

[Andy Powell]

Yeah, agreed. Tag clouds of interests and organisations are one of the things that Crowdvine gives you out of the box.

I think it would be possible to develop this kind of functionality inside Ning, but time and effort have prevented it for this meeting.