Preparing for #iwmw12

This post will take around 187 seconds to read.

Update, 17 June: streaming on, hurra; also some posts re sessions popping up, eg slides for #P3/#C7

IWMW 2012, the conference for Web types in UK HE, is taking place in Edinburgh next week. This will be my third IWMW. I wrote three #iwmw10 posts (which a quick read tells me was back when I had one dog and the temperature was around 30C), and I’ll sneak out my #iwmw11 post, still lurking in my drafts, shortly (sadly not a record).

Conferences in Edinburgh, of which there are many, make me come over all nostalgic, so I’ll try to stick to the programme (or the Lanryd schedule). Let’s hope the weather plays fair though, what with those famous Appleton Tower winds…

The technologies page talks about the technologies being supported to “enhance the experience of the event” but says nowt about remote at the moment. This is quite a shift from previous years, but maybe all will become clear:

Nearly home after a crazy week of traveling and events. Time to start focusing on preparations for #iwmw12

— Kirsty Pitkin (@eventamplifier) June 14, 2012*

What they are definitely using:

• Twitter – official account (@iwmw), hope to provide official live Twitter stream of plenaries talks via the @iwmwlive account, IWMW12 list. The #iwmw12 archive is up and running (plus visual version), and we have session hashtags for handy curation.
• Lanyrd –  just marked myself as tracking IWMW 2012, although I still find what that offers underwhelming. Brian Kelly puts forward some interesting ideas on how Lanyrd data could be used and has put together an IWMW guide, with the stress on the social. I’ve a draft on this, but essentially I feel it’s the coverage side where there’s more mileage to be gained. And what about people who aren’t on Twitter?

Programme highlights

The conference theme is Embedding innovation. This kinda resonates, as I’m having some success getting eventamp ideas out into the wild. Distressingly though, I have never run into one of the plenary speakers, Ferdinand von Prondzynski, before, despite the fact that he is a law teacher, Dean of the School of Law at Hull in the 1990s. Hear those worlds collide!

A second theme/subtheme is our old friend and this year’s darling Data – the new content. Is content’s moment in the sun already over? (No, see below.) Anyway, there’s a dataviz taster session (#P3) and workshop (#C7) which fingers crossed aren’t scheduled for when the dogs go out. Plus the institutional case studies are always good value.

From the 11 plenaries and 20 parallels the following look the most interesting at the moment:

• #P2: Open data development in the City of Edinburgh Council – it’s open data, it’s Embra, what’s not to like? Plus parallel #B4 on Big and small web data.
• #P4: Design of Key Information Sets – ties in with the ongoing research into law school websites (see also project details), interesting stuff.
• #P10: The good, the bad and the ugly: two years of running a content management service  (sounds a bit like the Warwick’s Sitebuilder) plus #B5: Managing and supporting a central content management system (CMS) with a devolved web publishing community (long title award).
• #P11: Measuring impact - always a good idea.
• #C2: A collaborative evaluation of web conferencing tools - I’ve a draft on this topic…
• #C4: The challenges of delivery content strategy in HE – which are legion. Came across Richard Prowse via recent #bathcamp tweets, this should be interesting.
• #C5: Linking you – the librarian in me just loves the whole idea of the Linking You Toolkit.

* This is an embedded tweet. Pasting in the URL for the tweet, as just rolled out by WordPress, just looks pants.