Today we conducted a little experiment in online communication, hosting an open online chat for any and all to walk in and talk to the folks here at Blue Flavor or to each other. The whole idea was announced and put together in about 36 hours using 37signals Campfire.
We saw a lot more people flooding the gates than we expected, having 70 participants join the chat throughout the hour. But overall we felt it was pretty successful and something we will definitely do again. For those who couldn’t make it, we’ve posted the entire public transcript.
The whole idea of doing a public chat came from wanting to make ourselves more accessible to have discussion with the community and make ourselves available to answer questions. The time we get to talk to people is often only at conferences or special events. We wanted to see if we could engage others in a dialog online, ideally talking more often.
While the signal to noise ratio was pretty hard at times, overall we found it to be pretty successful. I think a lot of good questions we asked and discussed. We made the mistake of not having a specific topic to help steer the conversation. And like I mentioned a LOT more people showed up than we expected given less than 24 hours notice on our blog, at first we tried to greet everyone that came in but that quickly became impossible to manage.
Some lessons learned:
- Have a topic. Try to stay on topic as best you can.
- Have a loose agenda. Try to have isolate idle chit-chat to periods before and after the chat.
- Moderate the chat. Have a couple of bullet points to help steer the room back on track.
- Campfire doesn’t allow you to boot people from the Chat. Though we didn’t see any abuse.
- That small ideas can come together quickly without a lot of over planning.
- There is nothing to fear about a public chat.
I think with a little fine tuning we can make these chats a valuable method of having a dialog with peers and others in the community.
So we are going to try to host these chats the first Thursday of the month. The next one will be May 3, 2007, 18:00 UTC/2:00–3:00 PM ET/11:00–12:00 PM PT
Update: Between WebVisions and a naturally busy week we are going to postpone the May Chat with Blue Flavor by one week. So the new date and time will be May 10, 2007, 18:00 UTC/2:00–2:30 PM ET/11:00–11:30 PM PT. We will post a topic and agenda early next week.
Please let us know if you have any ideas on topics. We’d love to address whatever hot topics you are facing. Thanks again to everyone that participated!
I actually thought it went pretty well considering. Sure there were more people than we’d expected, and we didn’t have a topic or agenda, but through the noise there was some good stuff there.
I think if we put together an agenda and try to stick to a specific topic it might be pretty interesting.
That is assuming people are interested in what we’ve got to talk about! ;0)
Great experiment! I’m excited to see you guys are going to continue the chats.
Perhaps a way to circumvent the noise potential you could post a loose agenda or sorts, prior to the event? Or maybe a list of topic-based questions that will be asked?
Sean,
My thoughts exactly. We are definitely going to provide participants a little more context into the chat, including the agenda.
Thanks for joining us today!
-Brian
Considering the chat on May 3rd will end approximately an hour before Tom’s talk at Webvisions, can we put ‘attempt to completely rattle Tom’ on the agenda?
Yes, the next chat will be likely be “Live from WebVisions 2007.” Tom will be likely be absent.
Sean, boy that sounds like just the agenda item I was hoping for!