Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Live Tag Surfing at 2gether08

Live Tag Surfing is a shared idea created between myself and Dan Dixon.

We are both very excited about bringing it to 2gether08 and hosting it throughout the two days. I love it because it’s an honest and fun knowledge focused facilitation technique with a heart of gold. Dan loves it because it’s part of his phd research into pervasive media and technology, and one day, sock puppets will be involved.

Here is a picture from when we designed LTS in The Duke of York, Bristol, February 2008

We first experimented with Live Tag Surfing at a gathering of Bristol’s Grumpy Man collective in 2007. Our aim was to explore how to existentially invert tag clouds and bring them back into the physical world; while they are debatably useful online, we felt that they could be more powerful physically as a group intervention method.

The core aim is to give event attendees an open platform to express their ambient knowledge and enquiry as a group, thus surfacing relevant group memes, turning them into useful conversations focused on people deepening their understanding of a topic of their own choice.

Simply - it’s a way to help people find others who are interested in similar things and assist them to talk about them. Facilitation-y - it’s a meeting between mindmapping, knowledge networking, open space and knowledge cafes.

Workbook scan: words and pictures at the high level

We are also interested in flattening the power laws relating to personalities. While social networking is a very liberating opportunity for people to relate to eachother on their own terms, we have observed that some personality types use it more ‘effectively’ than others, and this can skew practice and dicussions in those directions. Shy people need support at big social events.

Some of us are great networkers, some of us aren’t, and many conversations revolve around magnetic personalities rather than ideas. Live Tag Surfing will help conversations revolve around ideas and knowledge; help attendees find others who want to discuss similar topics.

When people come out of event sessions, there will be stuff in their heads that they want to share with others, connect over, deepen their understanding of, turn into actions and more.

Workbook scan: memes radiating from speeches

Live Tag Surfing provides an open platform to facilitate this desire by hosting a huge ‘tag wall’ at the event on which anyone can add one of their (limited number of) tags. By adding a tag, you are saying ‘I want to talk about this - does anyone else?’.

Gradually as the event progresses, more tags will appear. Patterns will emerge; bubbles will begin to surface. The tag wall doubles as a dynamic mindmap of the event, enabling anyone (at the event or not) to gain a high level map of what attendees are thinking about.

The wall will be nurtured and navigated by Dan and I with the noble support of some special invited guests in order to help make sense of it all.

Workbook scan: physical layout

As the patterns emerge in the tags, and the bubbles begin to rise, so the topical conversations can begin - the wall is now a springboard to help attendees self-organise their own breakout conversations based on the patterns in the tags. Attendees will be given bamboo poles with labels on them and let loose to take those ideas forward in any way they chose.

Conversations can bubble up serendipitously, and there will be specific ‘bubble bursting’ moments when we facilitate the breakouts.

Then what? Ah well, that would be telling… the rest is the future…