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« Sir Tony Hoare at QCon London 2009 | Main | Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship »

A Twitter change of a conference

By Aino Vonge Corry | March 23, 2009

Even after more than a decade of organising conferences, you can still learn how to do it better.

At our latest conference, QCon London, the speakers and attendees used Twitter to great effect.  You can read the tweets at: #qcon-tweets

What you might see is how the presentations were rated in real-time, and this had some interesting consequences.

First, sometimes attendees stay in the “coffee-area” during breaks, because they cannot decide what to see. We could watch them follow Twitter and when a presentation was rated good, they would go to that instead of staying outside the presentations. Second, they would actually leave a presentation which they had regretted going to, if they saw a well-rated presentation on Twitter. For the speakers it could be wonderful as well as hard to read the tweets about their performance, but they could get instant evaluations. Luckily most of them didn’t actually read the tweets until their presentation was over.

If you haven’t tried to tweet yet, this is the day to start. But beware, it is addictive!

Category: 2009 QCON | Tags: | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “A Twitter change of a conference”

  1. Roberto Says:
    April 1st, 2009 at 11:01 pm

    Yes, for the first time I appreciated and understood the power of Twitter. I had opened an account long time ago but never realized how powerful it was until qcon.
    It was amazing how the public was discussing about the talks in real-time. All got a new dimension. Being a non native english speaker, sometime it was for instance hard to pick a citation or a name. Few seconds later the name was already on Twitter, amazing!

  2. khiera Says:
    August 10th, 2009 at 10:13 am

    OK its amazing

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