It's been a week since the Participation for Change e-conference and I finally feel like I've got the space to analyse how it went and how we can improve on it for next time.

The day itself was exhausting but fantastic. I’m totally overwhelmed by how many people took part and how they just got on with the discussions. I’m really pleased with how effective it was, how people embraced the technology and the emerging sense of community between the delegates.

Delegates

This was the first time we had run an event like this and it was really difficult to know beforehand whether anyone would actually turn up! It’s a lot to ask of someone to take a day out of their busy schedule, especially if the online nature of it means there are other distractions to tempt them away from the computer.

In the end we had about 100 people say they were taking part on the “I’m here” discussion thread. The Google Analytics statistics shows that 297 different people came to the site that day and there were 220 members of the eConference group, so it’s difficult to say exactly how many people saw the discussion happening.

It doesn’t feel like there are a maximum number of delegates that this type of event would work for, which is great for us as we think about how to involve more members from the ENNA network.

Language

The whole of the e-conference took place in English, although there were speakers of the other languages on hand to help out if anyone needed translation.

With people mainly taking part from across the UK, Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Estonia it seemed sensible to use English as the main language.

The purpose of the Participation for Change project is to encourage cross country collaborations via the sharing of information and experiences. I worried that by using any of the other languages we would restrict discussions to people only from those countries, which goes against the purpose of this project.

I might be wrong to assume that, perhaps a large majority of our potential delegates speak German or Polish? I am going to ask the delegates that very question in the feedback form.

I am also going to look into the availability and effectiveness of real-time, online translation tools, please leave a comment here if you know of any.

Speakers and their videos

The way the e-conference was set up was by recording short pieces with people talking about different topics. At the end of their piece, they posed a question for delegates, who then had the opportunity to discuss it online.

The e-conference opened with a welcome from Mirko Schwärzel (one of the project partners) talking about how it all came about and what we’re hoping people will get from it. There were lots of positive comments about Mirko’s video and it really seemed to set the scene for the day.

Next up was a video from Richard Wilson, who was talking about international collaboration, online participation and the possibilities for positive change. Again, Richard’s session seemed to really hit the mark and got people enthused about what they could achieve.

After a virtual break for lunch we had 3 different workshops from Daniel Fluskey, Karl Wilding and Nigel Newton Sawyerr, all talking about issues that we found to be common to organisations working across all of the partner countries. The workshops were given 2 hours for people to take part, initially I thought that was too long but actually it flew by with participation happening right up until the end.

There seemed to be something so powerful yet simple about filming someone giving their views, posing a question and then letting the discussion flow, I’m keen to do more of it.

The website and applications

Ning

I’ve already written about why I chose to use a Ning site for this project. I still think that it’s a great tool for us. I can see that it’s not the perfect online conference host or the perfect home for e-mentoring but it allows us to do all of those things in one place.

Userplane chat

Although Ning has an inbuilt chat feature I wanted to try out other tools on the market. I went to Blendapps and chose to use their Userplane chat.

The thing that I preferred about Userplan (over their other tool, Meebo) was that it allowed you to create multiple “rooms” within the chat window.

I thought that the “rooms” would allow people to talk about the different sessions away from the general chat but actually they were a bit difficult for people to find on the screen and if there was no activity within the room for a little while it disappeared, taking all of the previous chat with it.

At the same time as using the Userplane chat rooms I also kept the Ning chat open, which I think confused people. They didn’t know which chat was for what and where they were meant to be.

What I’m keen to do next time is embed a chat function into each of the discussion threads so it makes it clearer that there is a place for people to chat about the session and they know where they’re meant to be. I will probably keep the Ning chat as a place for general, coffee-break style banter.

Flip

We used Flip cameras to record all of the speakers. The cameras only really have one main button so are easy to set up and use. As long as you are recording in a fairly bright room the quality of the video is excellent and I think that even the sound came out ok.

I used Flip’s own editing software to trim the beginning and end of the videos, ready for use.

YouTube

Once the videos were edited I uploaded them onto YouTube, as part of the NCVOonline channel.

Videos on YouTube have to a maximum of 10 minutes long, which is why all of our speakers spoke for about 8-9 minutes.

Once on YouTube, you can copy a piece of HTML code into your own website, as I did on the Participation for Change site.

I preferred to use an online site rather than uploading them direct to the P4C website because it makes them easier for other people to use. I’ve already sent the link on to the speakers so that they can feature them on their own sites, within newsletters etc.

Ustream.tv
I had planned to use Ustream as a way of streaming a live round up of the event through the site. I am sure it would have worked ok but problems my end with computers and the internet meant I couldn’t get it going in time. The good thing about a tool like Ustream is that after something is broadcast live, it is also saved as a recorded film so people can watch it after, just like the YouTube videos.

I’m keen to try it again at the next event so fingers crossed.

Participation

As I’ve already mentioned I’m still overwhelmed by how many people actively took part in the day, and from such a wide spread of countries. I am sure that starting with a committed base of people (the partners and mentors), building on an initial face-to-face meeting and then using them to spread the word to their contacts was a key factor in this.

The online vs offline question is an interesting one, my personal view is that the online should be something that compliments the offline. I’m not sure a purely online event would have worked this well on its own.

It seemed that there were more people from the UK formally commenting on the discussion threads and more people from the other partner countries, particularly Poland, using the chat tools.

I wonder if this is a cultural thing, using the tools we’re used to? Something to do with the language that was being used in those spaces? Or something else?

Notification emails

It's unfortunate that on the day delegates were deluged with notification emails from the site. Every time someone new joined the e-conference group or commented on one of the discussion threads, the site sent out an email to all group members.

I hadn’t anticipated that this was going to happen and it's a shame that we annoyed people. I appreciate the help of some of the delegates who stepped in to show others how to turn off the notifications.

One of the first things I'm going to do is add an item to the FAQs about turning off the notifications and flag it up during future events.

What next?

This was only the first e-conference and we’re keen to learn from this to create even more useful events. We're planning on running another e-conference, probably on Tuesday 21st September, please come back!

In the meantime we have launched a cross-Europe mentoring scheme, you can read more about it and download an application form here http://www.participationforchange.org/page/ementoring-1.

What have I missed? What did you think worked well? What would you like to see?