you beat me to it – David and I were going to forward this to you guys – we hope that our offering helps to build a wider awareness of the opportunities afforded by the product, and to help you evolve the product in a useful way.

Good work!

Great write up on the Online08 conference! At CrowdVine, we are always very eager to learn about how our users are benefiting from our product and where we can improve. Our best ideas come from users, and I see several points of feedback for us in your post.

We loved reading about how you bridged the CrowdVine data into a more facilitated networking experiment. Leveraging online information within a physical context (large data displays, mobile phones, print outs, etc) for the benefit of individuals and the conference community represents an ongoing brainstorm within our development roadmap.

Regarding your enrollment observation, we have an opinion.

One thing that Tony (our founder) often says, is that “when deploying successful social networks, its helpful to give people a selfish reason to justify their participation, and then let them discover the social benefits.” We support a lot of events, and for many of our users, our product represents their first exposure to social networking.

Its no surprise to us that our most successful networks also tend to be those networks that also leverage our integrated Calendar feature. This module allows users to review the conference content and build out a personalized conference schedule. As participants spend time reviewing and/or defining their “traditional” conference goals(by understanding which keynotes/ sessions they will attend), they have an opportunity to better define and discover their social goals (by viewing other session attendee profiles, speaker biographies, or reviewing specific session discussions, etc.).

Great write up again! Let us know if there are any questions or other ways we can help support your future experiments.

Chris Cranley

you are quite right it’s not my issue, and you know who to get in touch with at Incisive to have a chat about that – I know that they are doing what they can with what they have to work with, and are open to suggestions and good ideas

Good point about the twitter screen thing – make sure you bring that up!

thanks for the quite comprehensive summary of all the knowledge/social networking activities that you facilitated. Altogether it looks like it was quite successful.

This is not your issue I know, but personally I feel that the organisers are some way behind the curve on social networking, and the online facilities at Olympia are poor to appalling. I feel they are going to start losing some credibility if they don’t sort this out by next year.

On a related point – it would have been good to have a large screen display in the foyer area showing the live twitter stream.

Anyway, thanks to you, David and Emma, for all the work you did.

Steve