In today’s Telegraph-Journal, I was mentioned for Twittering from Imagine the Possibilities:
SAINT JOHN – In a pitch-black theatre at Samuel de Champlain, where 100 community and business leaders gathered Saturday to imagine the future of Greater Saint John, small lights flickered from laptops and cell phones as information zipped in and out of the room.
Jeff Roach, executive director of PropeICT, and Shawn Peterson, on behalf of FUSION Saint John, documented the Imagine the Possibilities conference with short, typed messages they distributed on the social networking site, Twitter.
The Saturday conference was an opportunity for community members to come together to imagine ways to make the area a better place. It was also the first time community members have been invited to participate in a Saint John conference via Twitter.
Conference delegates and online bloggers discussed potential projects for Greater Saint John, such as a second oil refinery, a new police and justice complex, and a recreational facility.
Twitter is a social networking site where people post small blogs or messages of 140 characters or less and can read similar posts from people across the world. Members of the site can access the short blogs on their phones or computers and reply to those.
“It’s a public conversation,” Roach said. “Imagine you are at a trade show and it’s full of hundreds of people and they are all talking to each other. Imagine you can listen in on all of those conversations and interject whenever you wanted. It’s a very powerful new way to communicate.”
Roach and Peterson posted short Tweets which summarized comments as soon as they came out of the speaker’s mouths; they posted videos that were played at the conference and took photos with their phones and posted them with short comments.
People read along with the conference while walking down the street with their phones in hand or browsing the Internet. Some of the attendees secretly used their cell phones to post comments on Twitter which sounded like conversations friends whisper to one another at events.
One blogger posted this from inside the conference; “there’s a civic conference with a live twitter feed. can’t decide if it’s dorky or fantastic”¦panelists envisioning sj 50 years from now: my vision? more young families in city centre than in the suburbs.”
Roach said there were several people from Moncton following the conference online, who Tweeted their envy of Saint John’s unique event.
“Right now Twitter is a major part of our media landscape,” Roach said. “If we are trying to get engagement from the community this is one way we have to do it or we are going to leave out a significant part of the population.”
Follow me on Twitter @SaintJohnShawn!
