Chuukaku.com

Well, I had an excellent time following #cilip2 on Twitter today (see my previous post for details). It's rather disorienting participating in a physically located session remotely through the medium of 140 character micro blogs, but it worked quite well, with the Twitterers in the room primarily communicating with the goal of explaining to us remote participants. In fact, it was much easier to understand what was happening than tracking a conference on Twitter usually is, as the posts were designed for an outside audience: you can check them out on this summary of the #cilip2 conversation. The major difficulty in following the session was the multiple conversations going on amongst those of us tweeting remotely!

The main point that I took away from the session was the idea, covered by both Phil Bradley and Brian Kelly, that CILIP needs to become more open to experimentation, and less afraid of failure. Having a static website with tightly controlled arenas for interaction is symbolic of the need to control communication and present a formal front, whereas Web 2.0 offers CILIP the opportunity to experiment, and learn from its members in an engaged and flexible manner. A good lesson for any organisation to learn, regardless of technology. I hope this translates into some plans for action on CILIP's part, or at least features heavily in their new communication strategy.

Aside from being part of a fascinating event I also picked up a few new skills participating. The suggestion that there might be Skype (although technical problems meant there wasn't) inspired me into having a play with Skype, which I haven't used before, but which seemed fairly straightforward. I also used a widget to feed relevant tweets into a page on this site so I can share the event easily with others, and I'm sure I'll use that system again. I may not have made the progress on my coursework I would have liked, but I think I achieved a lot today.

Labels: CILIP, Web 2.0