Due to the snowpocalypse that hit the DC area in early February, the Holocaust Museum’s first attempt at organizing a tweet-up was canceled. We have now rescheduled for Monday, March 22, 2010. Details below:

The first tweet-up will focus on the hot topic of mobile technologies. It is scheduled for Monday, March 22, from 5:30 to 7:30pm at RFD (810 7th Street NW; Metro: Red, exit Gallery Place/Chinatown; http://www.lovethebeer.com/rfd-directions.html).

Joining us to set the stage will be Nancy Proctor, Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and writer of the blog MuseumMobile, http://museummobile.info/. Questions we hope to cover include: When should one create an iPhone app vs. using the mobile Web? What are important considerations when structuring a mobile giving campaign? What are best practices for integrating multimedia and text in mobile programming? What are the most innovative uses of user-generated content in mobile programming?

Come prepared to share your experiences, whether successes and failures, and above all else, just come to hang out, reconnect with your colleagues, make some new connections, and have a few beers.

To ensure we have enough chairs set up at RFD, please RSVP to my e-mail awong@ushmm.org or at the twtvite for this event: http://twtvite.com/mt2vfe.

If you have ideas for future tweet-ups, please share those as well!

*This event has been canceled due to inclement weather. It will be rescheduled soon.*

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is launching a series of tweet-ups to continue discussions begun at The Conscience Un-Conference: Using Social Media for Social Good in December 2009. These informal gatherings are open to anyone interested in the application of social media and emerging technologies to further the missions of “institutions of conscience” or simply to people grappling with how to best use social media for “social good.”

The first tweet-up will focus on the hot topic of mobile technologies. It is scheduled for Monday, February 8, from 5:30 to 7:30pm at RFD (810 7th Street NW; Metro: Red, exit Gallery Place/Chinatown; http://www.lovethebeer.com/rfd-directions.html).

Joining us to set the stage will be Nancy Proctor, Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and writer of the blog MuseumMobile, http://museummobile.info/. Questions we hope to cover include: When should one create an iPhone app vs. using the mobile Web? What are important considerations when structuring a mobile giving campaign? What are best practices for integrating multimedia and text in mobile programming? What are the most innovative uses of user-generated content in mobile programming?

Come prepared to share your experiences, whether successes and failures, and above all else, just come to hang out, reconnect with your colleagues, make some new connections, and have a few beers.

To ensure we have enough chairs set up at RFD, please RSVP to my e-mail awong@ushmm.org or at the twtvite for this event: http://twtvite.com/yxpe9f.

If you have ideas for future tweet-ups, please share those as well!

Conscience Un-Conference participants,

Whether you joined in the lively discussions at the Holocaust Museum’s offices or via Twitter, on behalf of the organizing committee – Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media, myself and my colleagues at the Museum, David Klevan, Heather Ratcliff (who unfortunately could not be at #conconf), Michael Haley Goldman and Rebekah Sobel – I must thank you again for your interest and enthusiasm in discussing how institutions of conscience, and people of conscience in general, can better use social media for social good. We had hoped a diverse group of people with different experiences and skill sets would enliven a conversation about shared concerns, and we are humbled and emboldened that it appears to have worked.

If the un-conference was a success, it was largely because of your willingness to share your expertise and knowledge with each other. Now, we hope you will help us plan for even better future un-conferences. As a first step, whether you participated in person or via Twitter, we would appreciate if you would take a few moments to fill out a brief post-evaluation survey.

As many participants expressed, we too would like to continue the conversations started Saturday and we welcome your thoughts on how we can help sustain them. There was talk that a shared, collaborative online space could help support conversation, information-sharing, and laying the groundwork for the Conscience Un-Conference in 2010. If the Museum were to create such a space, what would you want it to include? What platforms do you think would best support it?

Regarding the Tweetbook, I’ve pulled all the #conconf tweets from Saturday and will start compiling them into sessions. If you facilitated any of the sessions, I would greatly appreciate if you would provide me with a short write-up that can introduce the session’s tweets in the Tweetbook. If, like Rik or Julie, you’ve posted a summary of your session somewhere online, please let me know so I can paraphrase an intro from that.

The Tweetbook will include a table of contents, the tweets pertaining to each session in chronological order, and an appendix compiling all of the shared resources. If you have any other ideas for what should be included, please let me know.

Thank you again for your participation in the Conscience Un-Conference: Using Social Media for Good. Here’s to it being just the beginning.

The un-conference thing is rather old hat for the Center for History and New Media (http://thatcamp.org/ and others), but the Conscience Un-Conference is the first time the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is trying its hand at this format. With help from the Museum’s program evaluator (and organizing committee member), Rebekah Sobel, I’ve prepared a very brief pre-un-conference survey (7 questions total) and a brief post-un-conference survey (10 questions total).

The link to the pre-survey is here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2T9ZHLN. If you have the time and inclination to fill it out, we greatly appreciate it.

Just finished making a Twitter List of participants for the un-conference: http://twitter.com/HolocaustMuseum/conconf-participants. If you listed your Twitter handle in your profile, or I knew it already, you’re on here.

If you’re not on here and want to be added, ping me with your Twitter name. Thanks!

The organizers met Wednesday to review session proposals and identify some possible groupings. You should review each of the proposals as well. This will make Saturday’s agenda-shaping go much easier.

Regarding sessions, please remember un-conferences are informal events. There is no need to prepare a formal paper or PowerPoint to present or plan on doing a prolonged project demo. You are welcome to show a few slides or Webpages, but anything more developed is not necessary. (Plus, you can highlight a project during the lunch hour, if you want. See below.)

If you do plan on showing slides, please put these on a thumbdrive so you can port them into the computers already attached to the projectors in each room.

The session proposals are entrypoints to what are meant to be interesting, creative, and potentially unpredictable conversations. Session leaders should serve as facilitators, hosts, conversation starters rather than featured speakers. We will explain this all with more detail on Saturday morning.

Dress is casual. Please wear something comfortable, and, if you get cold (and the weather is supposed to be dreary and cold on Saturday) in government buildings, you should bring a sweater.

The un-conference begins at 8:30am on Saturday, 12/5. This is the schedule so far:

8:30am-9:15am Breakfast and agenda-shaping.
This is one of those conferences where you cannot skip breakfast. Beginning at 8:30 we will begin collaborating on the day’s agenda, which must be more or less set by 9:15. Please arrive on time to make sure your session proposal is appropriately represented in this process.

9:15-9:45am Organizing committee takes the sessions and drops them into time and location slots.
The time slots are 60 minutes. Each room will have a projector.

9:45-10am Finalize schedule.

10-10:30am Introductory remarks: welcome, ground rules, logistics.

10:30-11:30am Sessions

11:30am-12:30pm Sessions

12:30pm-1:30pm Lunch – Lightning Talks
We discourage dominating sessions with project demos, so we’re proposing to allow people who want to highlight a project to have 2-3 minutes to do demos during the lunch hour. If you’re interested, we’ll have a sign-up on Saturday morning.

1:30pm-2:30pm Sessions

2:30-3:30pm Sessions

3:30-4:30pm Sessions

4:30-5pm Wrap-up

Looking forward to seeing you Saturday, or Friday if you’re coming to a tour or the social gathering. It’s not too late to RSVP for one of the tours; just e-mail me ASAP.

I manage most of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s social media outreach and I’d like to pitch a session to talk through the issues of commenting on different social media channels in order to think about how the Museum can serve its memorial and education functions effectively through different interfaces and different cultures of use.

For instance, Flickr’s comments (which appear below photos) and notes (which appear on top of photos) have raised some flags for us. There are plenty of good reasons to put the Museum’s photographs on Flickr or any other photo-sharing site (access, collective knowledge, etc.), but since the Museum is primarily responsible for safe-guarding the memory of Holocaust victims, is Flickr an okay place to do that? I’m interested here in the point that when we put photographs of the Holocaust on the web, we’re arguably putting artifacts out there. (Yes, these are “digital surrogates,” but not in content—the image is the same whether it’s printed on paper or composed out of bits.) If artifacts bear witness to the lives and suffering of people, can we put them on Flickr and let people mark them up with tags, and comments and notes, with the latter actually amounting to a defacement of the photo since it appears on the image? Can we put stuff on Flickr and turn off all the conduits for communication, even if it’s a violation of the culture of the space? If you have to turn off the commenting features in a social media space, is it better to opt out?

I’d also like to talk a little bit about how we can handle the comments we do get in more useful ways. First, I want to think about why we save all of them in these spaces. We don’t record idle chatter in gallery spaces (at least, not without appropriate signage), so why should we record it online? Is it appropriate to save everything people contribute to social media spaces? If not, then can we just delete all comments wholesale after a proclaimed period of time—90 days, or whatever? (I’m not huge on this, but I want to play devil’s advocate.) If it is appropriate, can we acknowledge the limitations of the interfaces and ask: should we archive comments after certain time periods and start fresh so people don’t have to scroll through 90 pages of commentary?

My point here is to think through preserving all of these comments and if we’re going to save them, how to make them useful. Can we create ways to sort and tag them so people looking for meaningful threads of dialogue or researchers or museum staff trying to track interactions can cut through the content in more efficient ways than scrolling? (Note: I think I’m proposing this a bit as a reaction against the way social media sites privilege “most recent” activity. While I think it’s important to be able to know what’s happening “right now,” or tomorrow, sometimes what I’m interested in happened 6 months or 6 years ago.)

I’d be curious to know from the more tech-savvy than I how feasible it would be to take comments from social media spaces and drop them into a digital archive that would allow searching and categorizing by platform, content, content type, etc. And I’m curious to know if people think this is worth doing. Thanks for reading.

Unfortunately the blog is having a little programming issue and is currently failing to show pages under the “Proposal” tab (we’re working on it), so it may appear that older proposals/posts are disappearing below the fold.

As a band-aid, I’ve gone in and tagged every submitted proposal so far with “proposal,” which will pull them all up together. Hopefully this issue will be fixed by tomorrow, but in the meantime, please tag your proposals” with “proposal” so that they’ll be visible to everyone.

Thanks for your help with this.

The Museum’s extremely polite and busy programmer, Shaun, has activated the RSS for this blog. Hope it makes it more efficient to check in.

Looking forward to meeting participants in a couple weeks.

Knowing that people have varying familiarity with Wordpress, this is just a short post to explain how to add a new post to the Proposals section of this blog.

Once you’ve logged in (e-mail unconf[at]ushmm[dot]org if you’re having trouble with that), you’ll see a dashboard with many options. On the left, near the top of the sidebar menu, is the option “Posts.” Click that and you’ll see the option to “Add New.” Type away, and then hit “Publish” on the right, and voila, you have just earned some blogger cred.

Happy writing.