wemedia fringe – a big thanks

Well, we did it. We managed to hold an interesting, well attended, productive and provocative fringe event alongside the We Media Forum. I hope, and think, that it was much more than just a social event for the conference – and feedback from speakers and the audience suggests that, in some ways, it succeeded not only in bringing disparate people together, but also in encouraging them to have a meaningful conversation.

Thank you to everyone who provided help and support for the event including:

Mandy Berry for believing in the event and letting us use her great venue. Eric the IT guy for helping set up the wifi, projector, etc. Kevin Anderson, Ian Forrester, Graham Holliday, and Alfie Dennon for suggesting and helping organise speakers. Scott Rafer, Lucy Hooberman, Gloria Pan and Richard Sambrook for understanding the idea and for providing encouragement to actually do something about it.

Special thanks also to our presenter on the night, Alan Conner, who phoned me to offer his assistance and probably never thought I’d take him up on it. He presented with knowledge and humour – fantastic!

And, of course, a super huge thanks for the speakers on the night. Without you it wouldn’t have been possible to bring together such a varied audience and to provide them with a stimulating evening. Speakers, in order of appearance, were Chris Yapp (Microsoft), Suw Charman (Open Rights Group), Ben Metcalfe (benmetcalfe.com), Michael Tippett (nowpublic.com), Tim Ireland (bloggerheads.com), Paul Evans (nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com), Neil Dixon (britcaster.com) and “Guido Fawkes”.

There were also a number of people providing coverage of the event, ranging from main stream media from at least three countries to podcasters, vbloggers, bloggers, flickrers, and the student journalists. Apprently someone has audio taken from the line out on the microphone amp and at least two people have video of nearly the whole event. Who knows what else there is out there! Please please please email me links to your stuff, whether it’s a photo, a blog post, a video, a podcast, or whatever.

But, I think most importantly, thank you to everyone who turned up and joined in the spirit of the event. I am, at nearly 1am, seriously buzzing from all the ideas shared and friends made tonight. How very very cool! ;-)

You can send those links or comments to me at: robin at cybersoc dot com

I’ll post up the details of how many people attended (as far as we can tell) as well as the amount of dosh raised by passing the hat around as soon as I have the details.