Meredith’s put together a great wrapup of the Five Weeks to a Social Library course, as well as a discussion of decisions made and lessons learned. My thoughts aren’t as cohesive as hers, and Five Weeks was really her baby from start to finish, so go read her ideas first, then come back.
By way of preface, I’ll say that helping with Five Weeks was an exhilarating, exhausting, occasionally frustrating, and entirely fulfilling experience. I’m not alone in coming to librarianship hoping to do good things. Five Weeks was a big good thing. Not only do our participant comments (a selection of which Meredith has posted) back that up, but our outcomes prove it. Five Weeks has already been responsible for several useful blogs, wikis, Flickrstreams, and RSS mashups. Just you wait six months and see what Five Weeks is responsible for then.
Said more succinctly: WE DAMN WELL DID IT. GO TEAM US! With an added serving of “major kudos to Meredith.”
I think Five Weeks fits into a newish but growing model for conference and training delivery: the small, home-grown, cheap, less formal, interaction-heavy, half- to all-spontaneous con. DASER. Code4Lib. HigherEdBlogCon. Access Hackfests. BarCamp. It’s important to note that small-group experiences have always been a part of even the largest conferences; JCDL 2006 was huge, Tim’s and my preconference tutorial quite tiny by comparison. What’s new (at least to me) is that folks are looking around and asking themselves, “Why do we need the herd-of-cattle part?”
I have a certain bias in this matter; as I’ve previously said, I don’t much like cattle-car megaconferences. I’ll speak at them when asked to (barring time conflicts, ethical issues, or gratuitous speaker maltreatment), but that’s the only thing that’ll get me there. Despite my bias, though, what I’m seeing feels real. The enthusiasm and engagement I saw in myself coming back from DASER, or my colleagues from Code4LibCon, or our wonderful Five Weekers, heavily outweighs that of (for example) ALA attendees I know.
On the whole, I find the small-conference movement a hopeful development for the profession. We aren’t sitting passively in hotel ballrooms waiting around for satori; we’re rolling up our sleeves to do stuff together. The question in my mind is the appropriate growth model for these conferences, as more people become interested in them. Just making them bigger will break them; we couldn’t possibly have doubled the participant pool of Five Weeks and had it remain Five Weeks. Screening participants (as we did) can work, but at a certain political cost and in some cases (not so much Five Weeks, as we didn’t by and large know our participant pool personally) a very high likelihood of cliquishness and other bad sorts of exclusion. Replicating mini-conferences in space and time has promise, and I myself think it’s the way to go, but at what point will the replicants compete too much with each other and collapse from insufficient demand? And will all replications be of equal quality?
But no, to answer a question we got, Five Weeks isn’t entirely sui generis. We share with the other conferences I mentioned a high interactivity quotient, much higher than the more traditional talking-head-at-podium conference. Notably, the interaction in Five Weeks went several ways: participants with organizers, participants with content producers, participants with each other, and participants with the larger librarian and social-software communities. Interactivity, even Internet-mediated rather than face-to-face, worked. Participants, organizers, and content producers enjoyed it, valued it, learned from it.
This answers another question we got with some regularity: no, we didn’t offer Five Weeks as a self-paced on-your-own tutorial. Frankly, I don’t think Five Weeks works that way, and I’m personally dubious that most such things should. I know plenty of people outside the participant pool have been watching the screencasts and reading the readings, and that’s great and I would never discourage it—but if that model worked for everybody, our participants wouldn’t have needed Five Weeks, because all the raw information is already out there for the taking. Interactivity and presence matter.
(There’s also a question of whuffie involved. Librarians are professionals. We’re supposed to be professionally active, which means an added injunction to prove we’re being professionally active. Individual reading and learning is not subject to proof and cannot therefore be used in, say, a performance review or a résumé. Five Weeks can, and in fact a few of our participants actually earned CEUs out of it.)
So in terms of size and interactivity, Five Weeks has peers and colleagues. But it’s also different from what has gone before it in some interesting ways.
First, its participant group. I make no bones about our goals: we’re disgusted by the professional divide between those who can afford conferences and training and those who can’t, and we intentionally chose our participants from those who (mostly) can’t. This did mean stubborn technical difficulties with a few participants, ranging from “the school I work at firewalls most of the Web and all of the social Web” to “none of the machines I have access to will play screencasts!” We got around it all one way or another, but if you’re thinking of following in our footsteps, be prepared for this.
The group was also rather more diverse in experience, outlook, and work environment than in previous programs of this type (such as Helene Blowers’s inspiring and often-replicated Learning 2.0) which have usually taken place at single workplaces. We had everything from library-school students to folks with a couple decades’ experience, from school, public, academic, and special libraries. Most of our participants didn’t notice, didn’t mind, or actually valued the diversity, but we did get one or two comments indicating that a more homogeneous group would have felt better.
I personally come down on the side of heterogeneity, at least in this context and with this material. Sure, it’s nice to talk turkey with folks just like you, but there’s more to be gained (especially in terms of mental flexibility around new software) from seeing what happens with the same software tool in wildly diverse environments.
The other big difference between Five Weeks and a lot of attempts at distance-ed is that we did it on the cheap as regards technology infrastructure. No high-priced consultants or consultant-ware. No mondo server farms. The BSA can audit us all they want; we didn’t have to pay actual money for any of the software we used.
With the exception of one piece of the puzzle, we used open-source software, commodity hardware, and freely-available web services. We were able to switch horses in midstream when necessary, too; Odeo crapped out on us, but blip.tv was right there to pick up the slack. The missing piece—and it’s a vitally important one—is live webcasting, for which we turned to OPAL. This is a bottleneck, and a bad one; I don’t envision free services becoming available for this, because it’s too bandwidth- and development-intensive, and (frankly) too much of a cash cow for providers. Library associations or consortia wanting to know how they can facilitate more programs like Five Weeks would be well-served to look into providing this service, or contracting with OPAL to provide it (because boy, has OPAL ever got it down to a science).
(But don’t, for heaven’s sake, do not buy some piece of megagonzovaporware that does webcasts, podcasts, wikis, blogs, hosting, content management, window-washing, and more. If you do that, you have not been listening to us. You will pay far too much for software that does too many things you don’t need, and does most of them badly to boot. Just plug this one hole and use open-source software and free services for the rest, okay?)
The difficulty with on-the-cheap infrastructure is that you have to install and run it, and if it breaks, it’s on you. Meredith was too kind to say so openly, but I was the one who broke Drupal into a million bits the first week of Five Weeks with the Akismet plugin. It completely hosed the chatroom, and threw approximately forty billion PHP errors before Meredith killed it. So what did I do? Tried to live up to my own words, that’s what. Took responsibility, apologized, and got on with things. And you know what? It was all right. I’m still alive, aren’t I?
But don’t even think of doing this without one organizer who can sling a webapp, and another who can fiddle with computerized audio and video. Experts you don’t necessarily need (this was my first experience with Drupal); people comfortable with FTP and a command-line you do. We had several, and we needed all of them. At the very least, find a webhost who can one-click-install most of what you need; they exist, and they’re even cheap.
So that’s Five Weeks as it compares and contrasts with similar efforts.
Now I want to emphasize the sheer time commitment involved in running Five Weeks. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that a small conference isn’t a conference, or that an Internet conference isn’t a conference, or an on-the-cheap conference isn’t a conference. It is, and running any conference is a Sisyphean undertaking. And, a tip? Don’t move across the country while you’re running a conference. I’m just sayin’ here.
I spent a metric ton of time reading applications and typing numbers into Google spreadsheets. (Judging proposals wasn’t nearly so bad, actually; we didn’t have the two-to-one ratio of proposals to available slots, and nearly all the proposals we got were useful.) Coordination time pre-conference wasn’t too bad—a few IM conferences, but mostly email and one-on-one IM questions.
Putting together my half of one week’s readings and activities wasn’t bad; this is what del.icio.us is for. Still, it took time.
During the conference? Well, here’s my weekly to-do list:
- Compose and send out a reminder email to my group each Monday about the week’s activities.
- Watch/listen to the week’s material, and skim the readings.
- Hit at least one of the webcasts, preferably both.
- Attend one or more presenter chats. (20/20 hindsight: I wish we’d worked out a schedule to divide these among ourselves, because I think they needed a facilitator. I got to as many as I possibly could, but I didn’t make them all.)
- Run the weekly small-group chat.
- Answer email. (There was quite a bit, and—again with the hindsight—I don’t think we divided email duties entirely fairly, with me being one of the slackers.)
- Check the Drupal admin queue daily for anything anomalous or otherwise problematic.
- Clean out comment spam. (Meredith and I ended up doing it by hand after the Akismet debacle; whichever of us saw a spam comment first blitzed it. It was okay. We got a few small-scale spam runs, but nothing appalling.)
- Read the blog and leave comments, at least daily. This was fun, and RSS feeds helped—but like everything else, it takes time as well as brainspace.
Like I said—a cross-country move in the middle of such a conference is a bad idea. Meredith and Amanda did a fair bit of covering for me. They shouldn’t have needed to.
My suggestion is to have a bigger organizer/helper pool than you think you’ll need. Some organizational slack is a very good thing; extra work will invariably come up to fill the slack available. Not everybody will pitch in on the same level—but somehow, it’ll all work out, if you just have enough human resources.
I note with sadness the rather high attrition rate—one in four of our selected participants did not complete the course. We frankly weren’t expecting that, or we’d probably have let more people join in anticipation of some attrition. We don’t entirely know why it happened, either; like a certain other set of attriters I know about from experience, attriters don’t usually tell anyone (much less anyone in perceived authority) why they left.
I’d like to know. Not because I’m angry with anyone, not because I’m upset, just because it’s important. I’m just not sure how to ask without giving offense. If you’re reading, and you’re a Five Weeks attriter—email me, won’t you? From a throwaway address if need be. Just let me know what happened, with both barrels if you need to fire ‘em.
We do know that some of the barriers aren’t what you’d think they’d be. At least one of our attriters was extremely leery of learning in the public eye—the idea of writing a blog post that might contain unfinished, unrefined ideas created terror and disgust. By and large, I think the public eye was good for Five Weeks and its participants, and if I had it to do over I’d make all of it public again, but we probably should have made this aspect of the course clearer. (Telling people they’ll have to “write on a blog” once a week won’t register if they don’t know what a blog is!) Similar programs may well legitimately decide that a private conclave suits their audience better.
One potential concern turned out to be no concern at all. The quality of contributed content to Five Weeks was astonishingly high (and is available for reuse, too). The beauty of it to me was that we didn’t have to pay big bucks for big names in order to get phenomenal content. Some big names contributed; check out the Five Weeks LJ Mover and Shaker contingent! Just as importantly, though, folks who aren’t (yet) big names can and do produce amazing stuff and give very generously of their time, and grassroots efforts give them a chance to prove it.
I don’t think this would work in a paid-conference model—at least, not as well. Exploit content producers (by charging buckus maximus for what they’re giving free, or by not treating them fairly), and you lose a big swathe of content producers. Exploit participants (overcharge! keep your books opaque!), and people like the Five Weeks organizer crew won’t want to do business with you. Try to do the right thing by everyone, and things work out. They really do.
So that’s my Five Weeks brain-dump. The key takeaway to my mind is that it can be done, and you can probably do it if you want to badly enough. We don’t have to sit back and put up with overpriced cattle-car conferences with mediocre content (not to mention the food), or expensively empty exercises in glitz and glitterati-basking. We can do better. We should.
