Friday, September 19, 2008

Encourage lurking in conferences!

I'm always amazed how old-school these conferences are. I'm currently in Ec-Tel 08, sitting outside of the session room on the floor and listening the speech through the half-open door. I'm a lurker.
lurking in ectel08
I do not want to participate in the whole session, but I do want to lurk around because I'm half interested and there is one speaker that I want to see later. I just don't want to sit in the room and tap on my laptop.

It would be great to have a couch or a few seats outside of a session room with a screen, and hopefully also audio, to be able to properly lurk. We already know from online communities that it is totally OK to lurk, so why would we not make it also properly available in the conferences, too?

I've had really interesting conversations in these marginal places of conferences. Let's just make them happen more often! Let's provide places to officially lurk around.

1 comment:

Niilo Alhovaara said...

Yup, lurkers unite :) It's a pretty interesting phenomenon these days, half of the audience at a conference or a workshop working on their - well, whatever hardware they use to take notes with (or, could it possibly be, just surfing around?!) I have a hard time figuring out if this is a positive or a negative trend! Perhaps I'm just simply too old -sigh-