Jun Rekimoto gave the opening keynote at CHI 2004 last week (I hope to post more on other CHI-related topics in the near future). Among the interesting highlights from his portfolio of projects was a chat tool used to augment a conference (the annual Workshop on Interactive Systems and Software in Japan) since 1997. One screen at the front is used to project the speaker’s presentation; another, slightly smaller, screen is used to show the chat session. Jun commented that the public display of the chat session can attract a great deal of attention, and while it has generally been viewed as a positive augmentation at WISS, he did admit that it can be a disruptive influence, especially for the speaker. Thus, while he described a follow-on project, memeChat, a wireless ad-hoc chat tool, and at one point showed that it was, in fact, running during his keynote, he only provided a brief glimpse of the tool in this venue — presumably, it is more appropriate, or at least less inappropriate, in a small workshop than in a large keynote address.
A Chat-Augmented Conference
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One response to “A Chat-Augmented Conference”
See Hecklebot:
http://www.toyz.org/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi?HeckleBot
http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=100392
And:
http://www.cheesebikini.com/archives/000262.html
I haven’t measured this quantitatively, but it definitely seems to me that on-site backchannel chatrooms at Emerging Technologies conferences are more active during the big all-hands keynotes (when more of the audience is bored at any given moment) than during the smaller, more focused sessions.
(But of course, more of the “what’s going on in session B?” sort of messages take place during the smaller sessions that take place simultaneously, because the keynotes have no simultaneous discussions to compete with).