Posts Tagged ‘Logistics’

Thanks, post-survey, Tweetbook, and… what’s next?

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

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.

Pre-un-conference survey

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

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.

Twitter List of participants

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

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!

How this is going to work…

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

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.

Proposals – please tag them “proposal”

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

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.

RSS working

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

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.

How to add a post

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

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.

Twitter hashtag: #conconf

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

You might have noticed that #con.con, the Twitter hashtag we first promoted for use for the Conscience Un-Conference, is disabled as a hyperlink in search.Twitter.com and on TweetDeck (and I assume other Twitter apps). Sorry about that. We’re ditching it for #conconf, which is not in use elsewhere. Thanks.

Welcome, and some housecleaning.

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Welcome Conscience Un-Conference participants! On behalf of the organizing committee (Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and fellow US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) staffers Robert Ehrenreich, Michael Haley Goldman, David Klevan, Heather Ratcliff, and Rebekah Sobel), I’d like to say thank you for your interest in the un-conference and your terrific applications. We’re pleased with the diversity of backgrounds and interests we’ll be gathering at the Museum’s offices on Saturday, December 5, 2009, and hope you will be able to attend.

In preparation for the event, this post provides an outline of how to use this blog to for session planning, as well as logistical info to make sure you get here and the event runs smoothly.

Session proposals
Un-conferences are user-generated events. Please post your idea for a session (a more fully-formed idea than you submitted for your application, but it need not be polished) to this blog and then, please comment on other proposals (share resources, indicate if you think your session would pair nicely would another, or if you just want to attend a session, etc.). Based on your proposals and comments, the organizing committee will create a preliminary agenda a few days before the December 5th event. You can check out my proposal for an example (it will be up soon), or see how this sort of exchange worked at CHNM’s 2009 THATCamp. Please get your session idea up by Tuesday, December 1, 2009, at the absolute latest.

During breakfast at the un-conference, we’ll have the agenda available for you to tweak.

How to post your user account photo
This website is a Wordpress blog. Wordpress uses Gravatar, which creates a “globally recognized avatar,” for its profile icons. If you register for Gravatar with the same email address as you used to create your profile for this site, you shouldn’t have a problem adding a photo to Gravatar and having it appear on your user profile. (If you don’t see an immediate change, clear your cache and give it about 10 minutes.)

When & Where
Friday, December 4, 2009, 4:00pm-5:30pm
For those who are available, we’re offering optional group tours of the Holocaust Museum’s special exhibition, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, the day before the un-conference. You also have the option of taking a self-guided tour of the permanent exhibit, The Holocaust. (If you choose that option, we recommend you budget at least two hours; keep in mind that the Museum closes at 5:30pm). If you’re interested in a tour of the propaganda exhibit, please e-mail unconf [AT] ushmm [dot] org so I can get a headcount to our Education and Visitor Services folks. For directions to the Museum, see this page.

Friday, December 4, 2009, after 5:30pm
The Center for History and New Media will host a social gathering in the evening. Details forthcoming.

Saturday, December 5, 2009, 8:30am-5:30pm
The un-conference begins with breakfast at 8:30am and ends at 5:30pm. We’ll also provide lunch. Directions forthcoming.

Not local?
As an independent establishment of the United States government, I’m afraid the US Holocaust Memorial Museum cannot legally provide recommendations on where to stay in the metropolitan DC area for this event. However, feel free to use the blog to get advice from other participants about places to stay. The Museum is located just south of the Mall and its closest Metro stop is Smithsonian.

Twitter
We noticed that almost all applicants provided Twitter handles, and we hope you’ll make good use of your accounts to communicate about the un-conference before, during, and after. Please use the hashtag #con.con when possible so that people can easily find our Tweet stream. The un-conference does not have its own Twitter handle, but here are the personal Twitter accounts of the organizers:

Tom – @foundhistory
Michael – @mhaleygoldman
David – @dklevan
Heather – @hratcliff
Rebekah – @rsobel
Amelia – @amelialikespie (It’s long, I know. Sorry. But, I really like pie.)

Center for History and New Media – @chnm
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – @HolocaustMuseum

Don’t tweet? That’s fine, you can still follow the stream by plugging in #con.con to http://search.Twitter.com.

Dietary restrictions?
If you have some, e-mail me ASAP: unconf [AT] ushmm [dot] org.

Questions?
Have questions or concerns not addressed here? Email unconf [AT] ushmm [dot] org.

Looking forward to meeting you,

Amelia Wong
Production Coordinator, Outreach Technology, USHMM