We are pleased to announce the formal publication of the Greening Events II Event Amplification Toolkit, and consider how this will inform further work in the field.
Things have been a bit quiet around here recently. Here’s why…
Last week saw the launch of the JISC-funded Greening Events II Event Amplification Toolkit, as announced by Brian Kelly at the Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2012. Brian explains why this was particularly apt in his blog post “Conferences don’t end at the end anymore”: What IWMW 2012 Still Offers.
I was honoured to have collaborated on this project with the Greening Events II team: Debra Hoim, Paul Shabajee and Heppie Curtis, and Brian Kelly from UKOLN, with support from the JISC Greening ICT programme manager, Rob Bristow.
The toolkit sets out to define amplified and hybrid events, to provide best practice for engaging with some of the most popular types of tool, and to help organiser to rethink the type of event that would best suit their goals. It can be used as a whole as an introduction to amplified events or as a series of briefing papers, and contains a selection of case studies to illustrate how the principles described have been used in practice. Whilst the report acknowledges that amplifying an event may not actively reduce the environmental impact of an event, by reducing delegate travel, it shows how amplification can help to expand the audience of that event without the corresponding increase in carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. The report also includes some pioneering work by Paul Shabajee exploring how how the carbon costs for amplified events can be estimated.
You can download the report in full here.
My key aim in this report was to document key amplification concepts and best practice principles in a way that is accessible to event organisers who are new to these types of activity, and in a way that will not become outdated as the range of third party social media services evolves. To overcome this challenge, I offered a series of briefing documents that cover different types of amplification activity rather than specific tools, including:
- Live Video Streaming
- Live Discussion Tools
- Resource Sharing Tools
- Event Capture Tools
The report also highlights the different perspectives held by the various actors within an event (speakers, suppliers, local and remote audiences), and provides an amplified event planning template complete with guidance about how to assess the risks associated with amplification.
The premise of the report fits in with the wider “openness” agenda, as I discussed recently in a guest post for the UK Web Focus blog.
Whilst this project has been invaluable to me as a way of assessing how far we have come and consolidating this progress, it has also highlighted a number of lessons, which I hope to investigate further in subsequent blog posts. In particular, it has made me acutely aware that we need to move on from the experimental stages towards more evidence-based event amplification design. To do this, there needs to be a stronger emphasis on collecting better feedback from remote audiences and collecting adequate ongoing data to illustrate the use of amplified event materials over time.
So, lots to ponder!
I will be blogging about some of these lines of thought in more detail over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I hope you all enjoy the Greening Events II Event Amplification Toolkit and welcome any feedback.
Image Credit: Tweety Yuch.
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