Social reporting at IAALD 2010: How good have we done?

While the IAALD 2010 congress sessions were unfolding and information systems, services and products, communication and information exchange were discussed in Montpellier, we used some social media to capture messages from the congress.

This approach, generally known as 'social reporting', puts together and connects a series of web tools and spaces to record conversations happening in a face to face event. The content created is shared using audio, video, slideshows and photos to accompany the written record. This content is remixed and reused in different information products. Travelling on RSS feeds it passes through multiple channels to reach different online communities and users. Using a common tag, this content can be easily aggregated, tracking the outputs of several people attending a meeting.

In Montpellier, we agreed to use aginfo10 as the event tag. All the content created was tagged with this label.

We tracked 30 'blips' - video interviews recorded and published during the event. Twenty-five were published on the IAALD channel. We also blogged on this blog as well as other blogs. We uploaded 61 presentations to SlideShare – there are some 80 slide shows in total with the tag 'aginfo10'. We created an IAALD 2010 group on Flickr where different people could share their photos. We also used the IAALD Twitter channel and sourced the tweets of other users and followers.

Finally, we collected all content and published it in a consolidated event feed. All the various conference outputs we could find are also tagged ‘aginfo10’ on www.delicious.com (157 Bookmarked items).

Besides defining and sharing the conference tag, a key element was to plug and integrate the different tools and applications in a ‘system’ with several entry points and publishing channels. We didn’t just publish on social media platforms, we wanted to make sure the content was picked up by a wide range of groups and communities - on twitter, ning, facebook, blogs, and feedreaders. RSS feeds were a key mechanism to animate this content dissemination.

To date, our statistics – one month after the event - show:

- we produced 30 videos, attracting some 2,000 views, or 59 views per video. The most-viewed video is a CABI interview published on Youtube.

- in April 2010, views of the IAALD blog and website increased by a third from the previous month.

- we shared 61 powerpoint presentations, attracting 18,875 views, or 310 views per presentation. Some presentations were standouts in terms of views:

• De la numérisation à la diffusion en ligne de thèses et mémoires africains : l’expérience réussie d’une gestion de projet de bibliothèque numérique par le CAMES (1853 views)
  
• The management of indigenous knowledge with other knowledge systems for agricultural development: Challenges and opportunities for developing countries (1738 views)
  
• The LIMS Community and its collaborative Livestock Information Management System for managing livestock statistics and sharing information in the SADC region (1315 views)
• Integrated information systems for farmers and advisors as well as vertical and horizontal chain partners and its benefits (830 views)
  
• Shaping tomorrow’s agriculture today (568 views)
  
• Nigerian rural youths’ utilization of agricultural information on selected arable crops: an empirical evidence (504 views)
  
• A global information portal to facilitate and promote accessibility and rational utilization of ex situ plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (411 views)
  
• Knowledge sharing on best practices to manage crop genebanks (397 views)
  

- Items listed in the congress news feed were viewed 4200 times between April and June 2010.

- More than 300 postings with the ‘aginfo10’ hashtag were tweeted or retweeted on Twitter just before, during and after the congress. The majority were during the event itself. Some 20 different people relayed the congress on Twitter.

Not to forget the 'social' aspect of social reporting, we want to thank all the followers, friends and colleagues that contribute to this effort, by writing, commenting, circulating and signposting the snippets of conversations captured in Montpellier.

by Pier Andrea Pirani and Peter Ballantyne