A Twitter bot for POD 2012 (and other conferences)

This week, I read 4 musings about Twitter use at conferences. I’ll describe each of the readings and then talk about how I am rolling them around in my head:

1) I read Three EduSocial Bots, Gabriel Harp’s discussion of social bots he would like to see developed for education. Though this article is not specifically about Twitter, I found myself daydreaming about the EduSocial bots he described being used for conference deliberations on Twitter. I’ll explain more later. Regardless, you should read Gabriel’s thought-provoking article.

2) I learned about a Twitter engineer’s new backchannel tool, currently called Osprey. Osprey provides a way for Twitter users at a conference (or watching the conference at a distance) to submit questions to speakers and panelists. As with Google Moderator, users can vote up their favorite tweeted questions. The tool allows attendees to send questions using an @ reply to the conference session host, keeping the conference backchannel clear for other conference interactions. Read the Mashable article about the tool for more information and then check out the Osprey demo from SXSW.

3) I saw the MLA’s tweet aggregator and archive, shared by Mark Sample, @samplereality on Twitter. The tool archived the Twitter handles of those who tweeted using the MLA hashtag, links and media shared on the hashtag, and tweet frequency (and other tweet-related) information. One thing that is missing is the ability to filter people who tweeted at the conference and people who tweeted from afar. But we have some ideas for how to filter tweets that way.

4) I read an email from a POD colleague complaining about Twitter use at last year’s conference. This colleague expressed frustration that people in the session were tweeting and not contributing to the discussion. Since I was not there, I don’t know how legitimate the claims are (how different does tweeting look from playing Words with Friends?) but I respect the concerns people have about tweeting at conferences. This person wants the POD conference tweeters to promote higher levels of discourse and to not tweet during sessions.

Though I don’t agree with this person’s assessment of tweeting at conferences and I don’t think we should tell people to NOT tweet during sessions, I think there is something to be gained by examining and enhancing the Twitter-facilitated discourse at conferences.

So, let’s put this all together. As chair-elect for POD’s Electronic Communications and Resources Committee, I am assembling Team Awesome, a group of ECRC members who want to extend POD’s outreach using social media. Using these ideas and rants about Twitter, I have written some ideas for Team Awesome to consider:

1) Put together a guide (or guides) for Twitter users at conferences and for conference presenters. This guide will be similar to Derek Bruff’s fantastic video on using Twitter, but will also provide recommendations for tweeters to extend the conversation beyond RTs and @s. Another guide would help conference presenters learn how to encourage appropriate tweeting in their presentations (without being prescriptive; we’re talking about autonomous adults here, people!). This presenter guide may include methods for effectively integrating the backchannel into a presentation, using Twitter to collect questions (perhaps with a tool like Osprey), and encouraging certain types of tweeting during sessions.

2) Design a PODBot that scans the tweets on a conference hashtag and refers tweeters to articles and resources on topics discussed in the session. The PODBot would also aggregate questions directed @ the bot under the appropriate session WikiPODia page and allow presenters to easily view questions for their session.

I imagine that a PODBot could do much more to deepen the conference conversations off and on Twitter. Perhaps the bot could reply to conference tweeters asking them to apply their tweets to a larger context, or to integrate their last tweet with the tweet of another person. The possibilities are numerous but the question remains: What will enhance the conference experience for attendees and at-a-distance conference followers? Share your ideas!

Now, I don’t know anything about programming a bot, but I am willing to learn. I just need a teacher…let me know if you want to help!

Oh, and BONUS POINTS for reading Alan Levine’s blog post about flipping conferences. Is this something we could do at POD?

Robot Boy image from FlickrCC user baboon, used with permissions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.