CIVICWEB III: Reflections on an exercise in blogging

This is the third of the planned trilogy of postings on a recent CIVICWEB conference and provides opportunity for reflection on both the event and the exercise in conferencing blogging. That the second posting has yet to be composed signals one of the core difficulties experienced: lack of time to properly prepare commentary on events. My first post was mainly a descriptive text of Coleman's keynote, based on his slides and my copious notes; the post lacks reflection, let alone criticism, of the presentation. The post also fails to provide information on the presentations by the two respondents and interventions from the floor, which immediately followed Coleman's talk. The post, as it now stands, provides an incomplete picture of that which transpired in what was, in fact, an intellectually stimulating session. The second post may surface in a few days, but the present material does injustice to the CIVICWEB event.

As it was, three of us involved in or related to the Ljubljana seminar were attending the event, and all three of us have posted material on the CIVICWEB conference: Maja Turnsek, Saso Slacek, and myself. We failed, however, to coordinate our contributions, leaving it to chance as to what we would cover and how. The result is that both Saso and I summarized Coleman's talk and neither of us addressed the contributions from the two respondents to the keynote. We made no arrangements regarding reporting on the afternoon parallel sessions or the plenary windup, meaning that nothing has been shared on those parts of the day. Furthermore, the entire CIVICWEB conference lasted three days; only Maja shared some material from Day 1. Nothing was posted about Day 3.

All of our postings are texts without any illustrative material: no videos, no photos, no slides, very few links. In these respects, our coverage is a far cry from the many conference blogs which are very much multimedia compositions. I did take a score of photos, particularly during the morning session, and may upload some of them at a convenient time. A good conference blog, however, integrates the material immediately and not over a period of weeks. There was a professional cameraman at work during the morning session, and he video-taped the keynote and respondents and took still shots of many persons then contributing to the discussion. This material has not (yet) been placed on the CIVICWEB site. I failed to ask how the material will be made available; I do hope it becomes accessible because the sessions merit a longer 'shelf life' than the event itself.

Much of the time at any conference involves informal exchange, mainly with persons one already knows. I did a reasonable amount of such exchange, including:

• Brian Loader and I talked shop about the journals that we respectively edit and I queried him about the recent decision taken by the publisher of iCS to increase the frequency of issues from 6 to 8 per year (which is a giant leap in editorial energy required).
  
• Peter Dalghren and I talked about our respective projects and mutual concerns about a new variant on an old theme, European public sphere.
  
• Victor Bohm (Central European University) and I considered the upcoming COST A30 event planned for Sarajevo and how organizational foibles could be addressed.
  
• Maja Turnsek and I spent time chatting about the virtues of Ljubljana, along with a revised draft of her PhD proposal.
  
• Tobias Olsson shared his impressions of the differences between Information, Communication and Society (iCS) and New Media & Society (NM&S) (the former publishing more technically-oriented articles) and I admitted, after examining the last five years of articles published by both journals, not being able to discern difference in authors or subject matter (this was an informal exercise; the serious, systematic content analysis has yet to be performed).
  

Sometimes, as Stephen Coleman recommended at the end of his keynote, conference-goers meet and talk with persons outside their established circles, and this time during the CIVICWEB event I followed Coleman's advice and spent lunchtime conversing with Marion Duimel who is also from the Netherlands. As I then learned, she is a colleague of persons I know at the Social and Cultural Planning Office, and published two books last year, one in Dutch on the Internet and teenagers (with an English summary), and another on the Internet and senior citizens. I also learned that Marion has a workshop certificate in carpentry and is presently rebuilding her house, walls and all.

Bringing this effort at reflection to a close, I want to stress that the richness of the CIVICWEB event far outstrips this very modest effort at conference blogging. The experience convinces me how difficult – impossible – it is to provide documentation that matches quality events like this one. Conference blogging when done well may provide a window into the event, but will never replace actually attending and engaging in a good face-to-face encounter.

 

 

 

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