N2Y3: NetSquared Conference, Year 3
This week, Trabian Shorters, V.P. of Communities at Knight Foundation, and I attended the NetSquared conference in San Jose, California. (Knight Foundation was a conference sponsor.)
In its third year, the NetSquared conference tightly programs two days of sessions on how to use social media tools like Flickr, the popular photo-sharing service, along with the real draw: twenty-one project presentations competing to be voted into the top three, with award money and the prestige of “winning” NetSquared.
The twenty-one projects are organized into broadly thematic panels (mapping, aggregation tools), and trends this year included specific asks to extend existing sites and databases with geolocative details, mobile interfaces, and formatted public data.
Most impressively, between sessions and in the hallways, conversation exploded. Presenting to an audience of their peers, the panelists fielded smart questions and excitedly announced finding technical help, calling out other conference attendees and thanking them. After panels, longer and more technical conversations often continued into the hack room, which became the Second Life Mixed Reality event on the second day.
This is a video I took between sessions and between conversations:
Bravo to the NetSquared team for creating a brief incubation of sorts where all projects could hone their ideas and grow from the interested and invested community gathered.
For more, see the conference agenda, blog entries, Twitter account.
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May 30th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Kristen, I am curious as to Second Life. I’ve heard some people say “it’s yesterday’s news.” What was your impression?
May 30th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Marc, thanks for your comment.
Netsquared’s parent, TechSoup, has a special Second Life project called Nonprofit Commons, and they’ve just launched a second island called Aloft–so not only does NetSquared understand this community, but they are actively participating in it.
It seems to me that there was a good mix of inworld and conference room gathering for this event (the mixed reality event did take place inworld on the new Aloft island), which is also key to a successful conference event.
Second Life can be a great place to gather if moderators understand the space and are actively involved in the community. (Confession: my avatar hasn’t logged in for some time.)
Here’s the liveblogged post on this Second Life event from the NetSquared blog: http://www.netsquared.org/blog/bwishinsky/mixed-reality-aloft-nonprofit-commons-launch-netsquared-conference
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:29 pm
Thank you for noting the wide variety of mashups present in this years’ Netsquared challenge. Having participated for the last two years this year felt different, more vibrant and complete as very diverse teams learned how to collaborate together. Our Second Life panelists were able to plug in on multiple web mashups while many of our Web 2.0 mashup teams became more invested in virtual worlds and immersive interactive spaces. The Second Life nonprofit panelists know community building and long term engagement better than most social media web startups and have been able to test out best practices together over the last two years, giving other technology and philanthropy leaders a look at how future collaborations may arise in virtual media spaces.
June 4th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
Thanks, Evonne.
It’s great to hear how the NetSquared conference has evolved, and I’m happy to hear about the level of expertise represented by Second Life panelists–