Events Around Events

As we have more experience as online event planners I've noticed that it's now pretty easy to get a group of people together in a Tomorrow Space event hall to talk about an interesting national event as it occurs. For example, today we're running two smaller events during Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote and the Democratic Presidential Debates. The idea is that everyone logs into the event hall and also tunes into the liveblog or TV coverage and then the group acts as a sort of synthesizer of information, pulling in relevant facts, throwing out opinions, cracking jokes, and posting links to additional information about what is happening.

I've experienced this sort of event synthesis before when I was a regular in the #joiito IRC channel, though in Tomorrow Space halls the organizer can pull in images and other web media for discussion. Also, the use of body language as simple as breaking out into two groups on either side of the hall makes it possible to split the conversation dynamically in ways that would be unwieldy in IRC.

We're learning a lot of lessons and there are still rough patches in the experience but it's mind bending to see the first glimpse of a time when people can immediately pull together a "war room" of people from across the globe in order to synthesize understanding about real world events.