{"id":13277,"date":"2010-09-11T11:25:20","date_gmt":"2010-09-11T18:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2010\/09\/11\/13277.html"},"modified":"2010-09-11T11:25:20","modified_gmt":"2010-09-11T18:25:20","slug":"group-note-taking-at-cons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2010\/09\/11\/group-note-taking-at-cons\/","title":{"rendered":"Group note-taking at cons"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>For years now, I've been thinking it would be cool to have a system for collaborative audience note-taking at sf convention panels. I've heard of such things at tech conventions, and I've done a little of it at meetings, but I don't think I've seen it done at a science fiction convention.<\/p>\n<p>Just woke up with a possible approach in mind, though it needs refinement:<\/p>\n<p>What if someone&mdash;whether affiliated with the con or not&mdash;were to create a Google Doc ahead of time for each programming item?<\/p>\n<p>I think we could mass-create the documents using the <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/apis\/documents\/\">Google Documents List API<\/a>, and if we could get an electronic copy of the con's programming info, we could pre-populate each document with the panel name, date\/time of panel, panel description, and list of panelists.<\/p>\n<p>Some potential problems and issues:<\/p>\n<ul>\n  <li>Would anyone even be interested in this? At WisCon, for example, which is where I'm most interested in doing this, I rarely see people typing notes during panels&mdash;often Liz H, sometimes one or two others.<\/li>\n  <li>How well would collaborative\/group note-taking work in the sf con environment? Taking <a href=\"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/collaboration\/collaborative-note-taking-101\/\">collaborative notes<\/a> might take some getting used to; my experience at meetings has been that it's worked best when one person is the main note-taker and others fill in additional material and make corrections and clean stuff up, but I'm not sure that would work at a con panel.<\/li>\n  <li>How do you make it convenient for the audience members who want to take notes to find the documents, given how non-intuitive Google Docs URLs are? I suppose we could just have a page that contains links to all of them.<\/li>\n  <li>Would the docs be publicly\/world-editable? If so, would there be a problem with vandalism by random strangers who aren't at the con? I think we could fix this to a first approximation using the abovementioned page-of-links, and make the documents editable only by people who have the URL (rather than by anyone in the world); that way someone would have to explicitly visit the page-of-links to get to the document, which I think would reduce the likelihood of random drive-by vandalism, though obviously wouldn't prevent it.<\/li>\n  <li>Would this approach result in a lot of back-channel audience discussion that would be invisible to the panelists and the rest of the audience?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Obviously the idea needs some polishing, and possibly it's not worth the work it would require; as noted above, I don't know whether anyone would actually use this system. But I think there's some potential, and figured it couldn't hurt to toss the idea out to the crowd.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For years now, I&#8217;ve been thinking it would be cool to have a system for collaborative audience note-taking at sf&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conventions","category-web-tech"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}