… while planning and during #vcsscamp

2. Having an event blog (this thing you are reading now) is really worth it. Despite my concerns that people don’t engage much on blogs, we generated 19 comments from 7 people (including me and Pauline), 12 people followed the blog, our main page had 657 hits and overall the site had 1292 views by the end of the day of the unconference.
3. It is helpful to involve participants in a very active way in the pre-conference discussion. Over a few tweets on a Friday afternoon I invited my colleague Eileen (@EileenFielding2) to contribute a guest post and it was by far the most popular post on this site with 73 views, 3 likes and a good conversation in the replies.
4. I want to learn more about WordPress Multisites and will probably use them! Thanks Duncan (@TawdryMe)
5. Much as I am averse to chalk and talk style instruction, showing a group of 8 or so people around Storify was actually a lot of fun. Hopefully it was a teacher-student / student-teacher interaction thanks to use of Google searches to find answers to questions about whether Storify could reverse the chronology of content (yes) or have more than one curator per account (we concluded no). And thanks to @francisclarke happily sharing both his story and his use of Storify in a most engaging way.
6. It really works having people who are new to social media in a room with people who are more familiar with it and wanting to push their organisations on to the next thing. The discussion topics were great and varied (see below) and I think everyone got something useful from the day.
“I liked the process for setting the agenda”
“The un-agenda let to some really interesting discussions”
“I liked the relaxed way the day has worked”
“The format was very enabling”
“The format has been fab, very open and laid back atmosphere”
“I liked the ‘free form’ of the event – informality really breeds free discussion”
Just a quick comment (for now) to add to Point 8.
I’ve been slowly building a list of the VCS Support organisations (CVS and Voluntary Action) that I have found on Twitter.
The list is here – https://twitter.com/watfordgap/localsupportorgs if you want to follow it or see who is listed.
If i’m missing anyone or any organisations please let me know!
Thanks
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