Over the weekend, I found myself thrown into an exercise to connect and apply the various social media technologies that we've discussed in class.
It all started Thursday night when I sat down at my computer in anticipation of my first ever Netroots Nation live stream. Eager to begin the first of 14 panels and trainings I'd marked as "must-sees" on my PDF copy of the conference agenda, I navigated to the Netroots Nation website, and clicked "Follow at Home." Suddenly, I discovered that the Thursday night panel I'd written down wasn't listed on the live stream site, as it was scheduled to take place in a conference room without a video camera. Big deal. I'd just plan to watch the other 13 scheduled for Friday and Saturday. Then it hit me: by some random coincidence, 12 of the remaining 13 panels I'd selected were scheduled to take place in rooms without cameras. So much for Netroots Nation! Maybe next year? Right? No.
I entered the live stream of a concurrent panel and asked the moderator if the sessions I'd hoped to see were, in fact, only accessible in person. "Yes." By the hours end, my disappointment tempered and frustration set in. But what could I do? Just a few years ago, probably nothing. And then came that "aha," teachable moment: I'd use Act.ly to target @Netroots_Nation and petition them via Twitter to add cameras to their few remaining conference rooms: http://act.ly/27t. It worked, sort of. Using the #nn10 conference hashtag, I launched the petition into the room, so to speak, of thousands following the conference from Vegas and across the world. Within four minutes, ten people had retweeted my petition and @Netroots_Nation responded to the post: "We do as many as we can afford, hiring video crews and streaming panels is not cheap." #nn10
Time for Plan B. Recalling Trace's in-class "experiment" to momentarily live stream via the new iPhone (using the free UStream app), it occurred to me that many of the affluent, tech-savvy conference attendees in Vegas would have the same capability. So, why not make Netroots Nation the first conference to crowdsource the burden of live streaming its panels?
By Saturday afternoon, I'd succeeded. My target? The panel on incorporating social media into advocacy campaigns. Instructing Tweetdeck to list all tweets containing #nn10 and "social media" that were also sent via iPhone, I identified about ten or so people live tweeting from that very panel. I messaged each, asking if they'd be willing to stream the session live via iPhone. Within minutes, one attendee agreed; moments later I sat back in disbelief as I watched the remainder of the session (along with Trace and others) via this stranger's iPhone -- thousands of miles away.
Earlier today, I sat back and wondered: Could this be the beginning of something much larger? With thousands of phones capable of live streaming sold each day, will the conferences of the future be open to the world? Maybe, but someone will have to make it happen.
The trouble, I think, is that the time expended by an individual (like me) to orchestrate a particular crowdsourced stream tends to outweigh the benefits of having access to that stream. And ad hoc solutions beg an important question: Who'll benefit? Just that particular individual? In my case, because I posted the stream's URL to the class blog, and tweeted it out using the #nn10 hashtag, a few others were able to watch. But the spirit behind this whole exercise -- that of open access to information -- demands a better, more participatory, solution. And that's what Wiki's are for.
So, why not create a website that facilitates such "crowdstreaming" -- powered by a Wiki -- that a) allows netizens to request that specific panels or conferences be live streamed, b) provides a platform for attendees to sign up to, and c) aggregates and indexes each stream so that they are easily locatable. Start-up idea or fool's errand?
Thoughts?
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2 comments:
David, this is great! What a great little micro-campaign. Congrats and thanks for telling me so I too could watch.
On a more serious note, I feel this is an excellent example of the expansion of personal powers. Using a regular computer, David was able to affect potentially hundreds of people. I retweeted the petition to my followers and hopefully some of them retweeted as well.
The data available on twitter and the power of the wiki format could allow thousands of streams of various conferences. Perhaps we should jump ahead of a future conference and get people involved beforehand.
This is a great write up and very interesting social media experiment on many levels - 1.) interesting that despite the conference name, they weren't thinking out of the box like you were in terms of a simpler technology to livestream 2.) how quickly you were able to get more people involved in your cause and 3.) how easily you got someone to livestream it for you.
Now on to your point about the process - yes, I think a wiki would be an ideal solution to corral crowdsourcing together so long as it is connected through all the social media platforms - I guess mainly through the designated twitter handle since that is how people tend to congregate for conferences. I would love for you to share this experience in class today for those that didn't catch it on the blog. Thanks for sharing!
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