I was contacted the other week by members of the organizing committee for the Medical Library Association Conference, to be held May 21-26 in Washington, D.C. After a few emails and a conference call, I have agreed to help out by coordinating their first annual meeting online conference community portal.
What is a conference community? What can an 'attendee' expect?
In essence, the conference community is an online experience being built around MLA 2010 that allows attendees (both in person or virtual) to interact and share through various online social tools. Some of the content on the site will even be made available for association members that are not attending the conference.
Yes. Agreed. Nothing really new here. Such tools have been in use at conferences for years.
What IS new for (this) MLA is that many of these existing tools are being pulled together, with new ones added, and branded as the conference community portal.
We have also been given the green light by NPC representatives to use the portal as a sandbox for attendees to play around with other emerging tools. The specific tools that will be used are still in discussion / development and will be communicated through various conference channels in the coming weeks. Since this approach is all new to all of those involved, we will be making up most of it as we go.
I would love to hear from MLA members about those neat things you have seen developed for other conferences that we should consider adding to the MLA10 conference community portal.
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