Between the sessions and the twitter backchannel, I learned a lot from these historians, archeologists, archivists, rhet/comp scholars and others interested in digital humanitites. It was fun trying to figure out who people were based on their twitter handles, and having multi-layered disucssions. For example, when someone mentioned a link in a session, someone would tweet the link within minutes, creating an ad hoc link/conversation repository. This method also worked for break-out sessions, where a group of people find a mutual interest and schedule a new session by editing the original schedule and tweeting an announcement. More information was packed into these two days than I would ever see in a traditional conference with more people.

I attended sessions on Open Courseware, social media analytics, teaching with technology, geospatial technology, Zotero and scholarly networks, and scholarly publishing, and we had a vigorous discussion about facebook vs twitter. I hope to   The people and topics addressed are too many to mention, but I will give a few links for those interested below.

Delicious links from the conference. Lots of goodies here!

A list of all the tweets on March 20-21 with #thatcamp hastag

A twitter list of many of the participants

A list of all the campers from the blog.

If you are not at the conference or event in question, you can use backchannels to eavesdrop. Take, for example the Internet as Playground and Factory conference (#ifp09), which had some heavy-hitters attending. Monitoring the backchannel discussions allows non-participants to interact with those present, and to keep abreast of the various topics being discussed.

The concept is not new. Students IM or text each other in class. Other social situations often call for subrosa communication. The most interesting difference is that the use of public social networking tools like twitter make the process public, and allow people to interact with strangers, or with people whose phone numbers or other info you don’t have.

A couple caveats. First, I wonder about the split in attention required for such discussion. If I am engaged in a backchannel discussion while listening to a speaker, can I really fully attend to what the speaker is saying? How much can I really do at one time? The second caveat is specifically twitter-related: the twitter search doesn’t seem to stay current for very long, so backchannels don’t persist as archives, but are useful really only during or just after an event.

While I am concentrating mainly on academic conferences, I imagine backchannels would be a good way to organize and communicate in other arenas, such as political events. Does anybody have any examples of backchannel communication in other areas?