putting the social in a symposium

Attending the Symposium on Social Architecture was a good experience for me. It's been a long time since I walked into a room where I didn't know anyone, and it reminded me of the responsibility that event organizers have to their participants.

At the opening plenary of Museums and the Web 2005, (I'm co-chair of this annual event) I was painfully aware that the conference was growing to a point that made it almost anti-social. I did the unthinkable for a conference organizer; I encouraged people not to go to sessions. When faced with a choice between continuing an interesting conversation in the hallway, and moving into a room to sit passively and listen, my advice was skip the session. Stay in the hall and talk to a person. You can read the papers later. Meeting people was the reason you bothered to take time out of your life and travel.

Meeting people was the reason that I went to the Symposium on Social Architecture. I'm working on a project - steve - that crosses over into a new domain, and I wanted to test my assumptions and kick-start my thinking. Conferences are a great way to get an overview, assess the lay of the land.  Did it work? Yes. But I came away frustrated, because it didn't work well enough.

There were many times when I felt like I'd wandered into a party that I wasn't really invited to... that I'd come with a friend of a friend and the host was wondering who the heck I was. This was reinforced by comments from the podium about how 'most of us know each other...' or 'we've been talking about these kinds of things for a while now ...'

Events don't have to be like that.  There was a lot of scaffolding missing at the Corante SSA; simple things that would have conspired to put us all on the same page, and helped to make sure that discussion was focussed and productive.

We needed:

A List of Registrants
I had no idea who was in the room, whether there was someone else working on what I was working on, or interested in what I did. No-one else knew I was there. In a symposium, where conversation is a goal, it's not too much to ask for participants to offer a brief profile of themselves before the event. There's enough social software around to support it. I also don't have any way to follow-up on some of the conversations that I had with people who were interesting, but whom i didn't trade cards with.

Formal Introductions of the Speakers
We were asked to take it on faith that the people on the podium had something to say. We didn't have biographies, we didn't even have formal names, titles and URLs so that we could follow up afterwards. Panel chairs could have helped by introducing themselves, characterising their interests and then taking just a sentence or two to explain why they had chosen these speakers, what gave the speakers cred to talk about things, and what topic they wanted the group to address.

Position Statements from the Speakers
Each of the speakers could have given us a summary, with good links, to what they were going to talk about. Liz Lawley thankfully used her blog to post the references that where her point of departure, but many of the others launched right into details without any contextualizing statements. This made the presentations difficult to follow. If we'd had photos + bios of the speakers, I could have known who I wanted to tap in conversation. Instead, I found myself googling the names of the people in the panel to find out who they were, and how I should interpret what they say. I believe very strongly in the influence of context on perception, and found it hard to process the contributions of the speakers without any background.

A Metaphor other than the Fireside Chat
The group was too large for the informal talk that the organizers wanted to enable. Conversations don't happen among groups of ~100... and as a result, the comments felt like they were dominated by a few. That the panels sat to speak meant that most people couldn't see them, and they couldn't see most of the people in attendance. Those that commented from the audience didn't stand to speak, and so it was impossible to know where the disembodied voice coming out of the speakers in the front of the room originated.  Session chairs seemed to want to 'open up' the conversation, but then didn't guide it, so we seemed to waffle around issues rather than dig into them. We needed stronger facilitation. Direct questions. Stated issues.

The parallel chat worked for a while, but fell apart when it was projected; it never recovered the sense of a substantive additional channel of conversation.

A Room with a Better  View - The Architecture Conspired Against Us
The room was a formal space, designed for one to many conversations. I've taught in spaces like this, and they are very difficult to have conversations in. Wide, long rows mean that there are no sight-lines across the room, so inter-participant conversation is stultified. Encouraging people to move to the front might make it feel better for the presenters, but it made it worse for those in the rows, which may be why they chose not to move. There also wasn't enough room in the chairs for laptop, briefcase, notes, and self  without an empty place beside you. We needed to be able to move the furniture, make circles not rows, break out into smaller groups and come back together again.

There wasn't enough informal space around the room either. Coffee was served in a corner at the back, without much chat-room in front, and we were told at the beginning not to talk in the halls (felt rather like being back in high-school). As a result, the group didn't mix much. We seemed to get stuck in the spaces we occupied at the outset, and then were limited by our location.

To Take Away
It's good to be the new kid in town once in a while, if only to remind us serial conference-goers that we have a responsibility to look outside our known universe, to expand our own horizons by engaging with people we don't already know. Next time you're at a meeting, introduce yourself to someone you don't know, and find out why your paths  haven't crossed before. You've got something in common or you wouldn't be in the same place. And introduce a colleague to someone you know but they don't. Invest in community through introductions. Then we'll all learn something.

But it was worth it ...
All this sounds overly negative, and it shouldn't. That's not the feeling I came back with. I took a lot away from my 24 hours in Cambridge, including the Thought that Made it All Worthwhile: tags are personal, and the business cards of some people I hope I'll see again. And I learned a lot  about social architectures in physical and inter-personal spaces.