Now that the three in-country workshops are over, I propose we move on to try and create an across-country debate. This fits quite well with the narrative of the upcoming Tbilisi final Spot The Future event, which will bring together a (small, since we don’t have a large budget) number of Edgeryders from all over the world.
So, I was thinking we could start by doing a Twitterstorm to let the world know that we’ll be meeting up soon. On top of pushing out the final workshop itself, we would also share links on interesting initiatives from the community, emphasizing those that have sprung from STF itself (like the project of a TEDx on work and meaning in Yerevan) but also others, shining some light on the many initiatives at the edge that are, daily, building the future we’ll all live in. I expect the main impact of the Twitterstorm to be cognitive: people should perceive more clearly the broader community beyond the scene and the country they inhabit. Certainly, it worked for us in Western Europe. People saw tweets in Russian and Portuguese and went “wow, we are all over the place”. The key is obviously “we”.
In order to do the Twitterstorm we need:
an info page on some website, with the dates and the place of the final workshop.
about 10-15 links to other STF-ER initiatives that we want to promote.
Remember that unfortunately we have been unable to find dates that accommodate everyone for the event. We’ll try to find a solution in the coming week, before the Wednesday call – @Nadia and @Noemi can you look into the matter please? Hopefully, we’ll be ready to roll with the Twitterstorm the week starting May 5th. @saidhamideh, you might find this interesting too.
For some reason I can’t access it, @Nadia. Also, I have been having a flu these last few days, so I am not feeling to well. When I have access I’ll try to work on it, def tomorrow morning.
In parallell today let's write the skeleton for the follow up blogpost for what we do between now and the event in June and invite community members to help flesh it out.
Time to build the june event for real. It will be where we come together and share the results of the work between now and then, meet people we've only been talking with online, and plan together where we want to go next.
Sounds great and much needed. We have so much great initiatives to showcase, both existing ones in each country that would benefit from a global outreach and also work in progress that could use some of the Edgeryders skilled collaborators who have experience trying out similar things.
@Hazem : I agree that we can start working on a wiki, my suggestion is to put up simple information with name/scope of initiative + twitter handles of those involved. As for the actual tweets, I suggest more of us prepare their own in advance, with @saidhamideh coordinating the official ER channel tweets. From past experience, if we put up a spreadsheet in advance with all the actual tweets, people tend to just copy-paste them and this reduces the variety of creative messages and feels like spamming with the same tweet all over (for that we have the retweet option).
Another thing is the channel: I think this time we should make an effort to use facebook equally, not just twitter, simply because Georgians and Armenians (Egypt perhaps not so much) are mostly there and it would be a pitty not to involve the protagonists in the event.
@saidhamideh, could you recommend the best day of the week/time of the day to get the maximum impact (it seems that there are some opinions out there)?
@Noemi, if we share stuff on Facebook, by what tool do we collect the feedback? The Twitterstorm is fun because we see the results straight away, in terms of RTs, trending topic results, and the final network of tweets via NodeXL. Facebook's APIs do not allow the same type of work, as far as I can see. An alternative would be to ask Armenians and Georgians to start Twitter accounts as see if we can "game" Twitter in those countries. Should not be too hard to trend in Armenia – maybe we can exploit that?
Very useful, with pass changes I cant access it anymore, but no prob. So these are the times twitter computes based on the activity and location of our followers? So not based on the RTs from our own account’s track record ? Ok…
Monday was good last time…
@Alberto: re the facebook as channel - I wasn’t thinking in terms of monitoring in a sophisticated way, rather a search by hashtag that allows you to see who posted or liked what. But I was thinking more aligned with where the core people that we want to participate are, and the others potentially interested. I understand our own reasoning for twitter, but the question is not how it works for us but for all who are involved. I’m hoping some of the #futurespotters in Ge and Ar could advise on this… anyway, just a thought.
its looking at follower activity on the Edgeryders timezone (ours is set to Stockholm GMT +1) based on the times that they post any tweets which means they are also around to read tweets from us.
@Noemi, I am not averse to trying it out. I am concerned that, without proper monitoring, we will just not know whether it is going well or not, so we will not learn anything from the exercise… that said, who does the work calls the shots, so if people want to share links on Facebook we won’t stop them (we could not even if we wanted to!).
But honestly, I think it is going to be a fairly lonely experience. You share a link; so do, say, six other futurespotters in Armenia. Your timeline now shows: “you, Alice, Bob and 3 more people shared this”. Likes/comments do not sum up, because they are all spread across the six shares. Facebook does not show you that people out of your network, say in Sweden or the UK, have also posted the same link. Even searching by hashtag returns results limited to your friends, and only in your country (I tried searching by #opendata; I know plenty of opendata people in Europe, but nothing from them came up, just from the Italians.
By contrast, with Twitter people search by hastag and immediately collect the tweets of the whole community, wherever it is, in all its glorious diversity. I don’t mean to get techno-deterministic here, but I struggle to see how we could stage a decent show with FB…
I just wanted us to keep in mind some of the lessons in the past, that’s all. Working on @Nadia’s suggestion for writing up first, and you can help add the instructions for the twitterstorm in the same wiki…? That’s my understanding of the process. Let’s keep working!
