CIVICWEB I

Introductory note:

I agreed to blog on the seminar I attended as the researcher in Civicweb: CIVICWEB, from 4^th to 5^th of February in London organized by the project leaders: Centre for the Study of Children, Youth and Media, Institute of Education. The incentive came from Nick, as he discovered that conference blogging is a popular thing to do, and conference blogs are becoming a new blog genre with conventions and guidance on how to do it. Since I planned to start bloggin again, and Nick has been trying to persuade me on it for some time now, it also became one of the first tasks for my new Validity blog. The conference lasted for two day, but since Nick has already published information on the second day aimed at academics, I will publish more extensively on the first day: meeting with practitioners.

More on Civicweb project and the seminar:

• Civicweb website
• Nick’s post on the second day of the conference

Thoughts on blogging a conference

This definitely was not my conference. Don’t get me wrong, this has nothing to do with the content of the conference, I just had an overspill of logistic problems. I somehow managed to delete/corrupt my wireless days before, but of course remembered that I will need it only on Sunday – a day before the departure. (Then I tried to fix it and ruined my cable connection also, which took me couple of hours to fix.) Publishing a blog from the conference thus was out of the question since they only had wireless for public use. To make the long story short, my hand-bag was stolen with my passport, credit cards, telephone and money with it the night before my plane left. I have learned that for every foul act of one person there is an effort of much more good people needed to correct it. So, thanks to Tadej, my friend, the Slovene embassy, and people from Travel Care of Gatwick Airport I got home on the same day I had it planned, it just took me a lot longer, was much more expensive, and almost gave me a heart attack or a nervous breakdown (the last two are exaggerations, but you probably can imagine, how it feels to be without a penny in a foreign country depending only on the kindness of others).

I am not sure I would publish the blog simultaneously even if I had the wireless – it really took me a lot of time to edit and multitask the text with all the links to other information. But probably with experience it gets a lot easier.

The lessons I can get out of the experience of blogging on conferences:

1. Make sure you have your internet connections all sorted before you go anywhere.
2. Take good care of your personal belongings!
3. Blogging on conferences is a difficult and at least at the begging time-consuming task, but an extremely useful way for making notes with links on presenters and presentations.