It was a brilliant event with a huge range of attendee-driven workshops, excellent plenary sessions, a very pro-active crowd in a lovely venue. The Policy Unplugged team hosted the event while the Germination team ran the event organisation. Our tag surfing was in the marquee along with The School of Everything (doing 5 minute teach-ins), and the Connections board (helping with social networking). My favourite speech was a draw between the MORI poll and the Artic adventurer, the opera was surprisingly good, and the workshops were thoroughly useful. Not forgetting the excellent food and the superb venue, of course.

The ‘tag wall’ was two metaplan boards (huge thank you Jack Martin Leith for the long term loan) in the corner of the marquee, left hand side:

Live tag surfing wall in situ at the beginning of the event

Day one

We turned up early and set the boards up. We left them blank (with the ‘live tag surfing’ title) deliberately to see what happened, and one of us was always in situ to explain the wall to interested attendees. The ‘tags’ (post-it notes) were in the welcome packs, along with explanatory text on a separate card. We made a few general announcements to attendees about the wall, and asked a number of people we knew to ‘champion’ it by adding their own tags and telling others about it.

Not many tags were added. People did not know about the tags in the welcome packs, and struggled to find them once we had pointed them out. Although they all expressed interest in the idea, only a minority of them added any tags (even our ‘champions’). Plenty of people looked at the wall and thought it was interesting, but didn’t add anything (Jakob Nielsen’s participation law perhaps?). Some people said that they were going to add a word but it was there already.

The space was a pleasure to be in, but people did not really loiter or network in the marquee; they ate and chilled out, and played with their computers. The serious business of networking happened around the canteen, over the food tables and outside the marquee. We tried to encourage people to participate directly on a couple of occasions, but agreed that if people weren’t keen, then we wouldn’t drag them into it. We also decided to cancel the ‘breakouts’ on the same principle.

post it note on tag wall

Day two

After a ‘character forming’ kind of day one, we decided to hack the system a little bit, and direct the tag wall somewhat (from its ‘minimal intervention’ origins).

We added an event-related question, clear explano-text, and stuck a bunch of post-it notes to the wall for easy access. This attracted more tags than day one, but still not the explosion of thinking matter we had hoped for. We still felt ‘on the fringes’ of the networking and talking activity, which was going on enticingly close, but agreed not to push the wall too heavily as per day one.

When people loitered, and groups formed around the wall, the tags provoked excellent conversations (ranging from multinational organisations’ information systems to death as a metaphor), and people had clear ‘aha’ moments. But this happened all too rarely as everyone was somewhere else most of the time. We also felt that the attendees were very good at networking already – sometimes it is clear people want some help; on this occasion it was clear that they didn’t need it.

We have a firm proof of concept and a much clearer understanding of how and why to run a tag wall in different environments.

When it wasn’t covered in millions of smiling happy tags I felt a nasty painful little pang and wanted the earth to swallow me up, but that’s not going to get anything improved is it? If you don’t take risks when inventing new things, you’re not really inventing things are you? We had no idea what was going to happen, so anything is pure findings. When it worked, it was great, so we shall focus on these bits in the future and ensure that we don’t fall into any of the gaps we found.

Thanks to the event team for giving us the space and time to try it out.

Some lessons learnt:

• Position the wall somewhere useful and unavoidable (e.g. where people wait for tea) – it defnitely encourages conversation but only if people are loitering near it
• Consider the people types and the context – is it suitable? Do they need it? How can it relate to the purpose of the event?
• Consider the virtual networking before the event and how to integrate with it - these new event networking systems are great – but how do they work when you’re actually on site? We think this could be a handy blended tool
• Contextualise the wall: add specific questions or domain enquiry
• Clear, directional explanation on the wall
• Big attractive banner on the top of the wall to attract attention
• Prominent marketing of the wall required by the organisers – make it part of the event and promote it
• Clear meaningful integration with the event required
• Make the wall, notes and signs attractive
• People add their own notes – that’s OK
• Keep spare notes to hand – some people will want more; don’t deny them the pleasure
• Separate the notes from any welcome pack – they are likely to get forgotten unless they have clear support and the welcome pack is vital to the event
• It might work to have someone at the welcome point handing the notes out with explano-text next to the welcome pack people, but this wouldn’t help with queue length
• It is OK to leave the blank notes on the wall and ask people to help themselves – this helps avoid the welcome pack problem
• Don’t worry about word counts on the notes
• Include keywords from speakers/talks
• People don’t add the same words once one is up, which can hinder the ‘emergence’ element- encourage them to!
• Perhaps frame the board with a map or a grid to encourage adding words
• If people don’t use the wall, try to encourage them a bit (in case they didn’t hear about it), but if that doesn’t catch, don’t beat everyone up about it with repeated announcements; either try a different angle, or relax and enjoy the event

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…