nancy white’s visit to emint

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending much of the afternoon and evening in the company of Nancy White. She stopped by the BBC for an informal chat with a wide range of BBC people involved in building and managing online community sites like the Collective, The Time When, the BBC Film Network, Video Nation, Action Network and the BBC blogs trial.

We then headed into Covent Garden where Nancy gave a talk at e-mint, the Interational Association of Online Community Managers. It’s been a while since we’ve had an e-mint meeting so myself and Lizzie Jackson, who found a booked the venue, were a bit nervous that we might have to pass a hat around to make up for not meeting the minimum spend required but that wasn’t at all a problem since around 40 people turned up! David Wilcox had made it home and blogged it by about the time I stumbled out of the venue.

For those who were there and were wondering what on earth I was doing with the microphone and minidisc recorder, BBC 5Live’s Pods and Blogs roped me into doing an interview with Nancy and recording part of her talk. Not only did I manage to get some great audio of Nancy, I also interviewed Professor Sue Thomas, Rob Marcus from ChatModerators, a post-graduate researcher from the LSE whose name escapes me named Michael Zarb, Lilia Efimova and Larry White. I might have interviewed a few other people too but the tail end of the meeting is a bit blurry owing to 3-4 pints of Spitfire Ale poured into a stomach that had previously been home only to coffee that day.

Thanks to everyone who turned up – having so many people from such a wide spectrum of the online community industry and academia really made the evening enjoyable.