In the past week I have attended more than 30 panels which has resulted in information overload. However, there were some key panels that have inspired me to start new projects as I go back home to Pennsylvania and then back to Birmingham. One thing that I have learned and observed is that the panel speakers aren’t necessarily the experts, its the people in the audience, who are asking the questions and challenging the assumptions of the panel that know more than the panel speakers. For everyone that is interested in seeing the tweets from all of the panels at SXSW have a look at SessionTweets. Also have a look at PepsiCo’s Zeitgeist project, which will show you trends, locations of tweets, photos and almost everything you need to know.

The Interactive part of SXSW was extremely overwhelming, especially because it was my first time. However, I think if I decide to come back again next year (which the chances are very high) I have learned some things that will make it so much better. Now that the Interactive one is over, the Music one started yesterday. The Music part kicked off and the culture of the conference has completely changed. Not so much of the free drinks, cocktails, foods, and parties, but more of the people. You can tell that the nerds and geeks are gone!

I am still in the information overload state, which is completely fine, but I will reflect more on the whole SXSW experience, once I get some time to sit down and think about it.

At home, I got myself a meeting with the Mayor of Jonestown. Turns out it was the Mayor’s last week in office, but that didn’t keep him from getting me in touch with the Borough Council’s Vice-President (now the President), who manages Jonestown’s website. While having a chat with him, he asked me to come present it to the Borough Council. At first, I was extremely excited to present it until I realized it was the first meeting of the year for the Borough so there will be quite a crowd there.

I opened my presentation with the following, “MyTown is a social enterprise which aims to build a stronger community by education and empowering the citizens digitally to ensure sustainable civic engagement.” Looking around I saw some confused yet excited faces, which to me meant that they were eager to find out more about it. The presentation ended up being good enough for the Borough to unanimously adopt it with a budget of $200.

Since, it was the first meeting of the year, the local newspaper was present there along with the County Commissioners of Lebanon County. One of the Commissioners, Jo Ellen Litz, who already films the weekly commissioners meeting and uploads them to YouTube, got in touch with me and asked me to come present the same presentation to the rest of the commissioners. I immediately said yes, without considering the fact that they had already declined to do this when Commissioner Litz asked them almost a year ago. Commissioner Litz thought that since Jonestown’s Borough unanimously agreed to adopt the project, why not see if it can be adopted for the entire county.

As I was preparing for the presentation, I spent nearly three hours looking for data relating to Lebanon County. Let me tell you there is very little public data available. Lebanon County website does no justice at all either. Taking account of this, I decided to spend majority of my time talking about the need for transparency in local government. The county commissioners meeting occurs every Thursday at 9:30AM. I was given 20 minutes to talk about the project and majority of my talk I focused on why the county should adopt it. I also mentioned the fact that many people couldn’t attend this meeting because it was during business hours and most of the people are working full-time jobs.  They listened and moved to a vote, no one second therefore it was not approved.

Their decision to not approve gave me my 15 minutes of local fame and put the two commissioners in a situation that could have easily been avoided with a simple yes. Turns out the story about them declining the offer to have their meetings webcast, turned up on the front page of the local daily newspaper. People who follow local politics were outraged from this and posted their comments on Lebanon Daily News’s website. The day the story was in the paper, I was also invited to talk about it on the local radio station WLBR 1270 AM.

Even though my offer was declined, I have decided to continue on convincing them to adopt it later in the summer. There is a bit of irony to this, which is, during the presentation, one of the things that I talked about was how streaming the meeting would mean the commissioners would be talking and taking actions directly in front of their constituents. Their constituents would know exactly what they would be saying, not something they would hear from the local newspaper or radio station. Turns out the commissioners want to wait and see the results of live streaming the meeting in the Borough of Jonestown, before they decide on taking the project up in the county. However, that wasn’t conveyed in the newspaper correctly. Only if they would have listened to me!

One of the projects assigned to us was to research a country and then participate in an online conference, which was setup to be like the United Nations. The conference took place twice a week for about three hours each day. Each group had three students and we were given various topics to debate about. Since the conference was conducted online we could have been anywhere on campus, as long as we were in the virtual conference room. Once the conference started the Professor was of course the moderator and one person from each group had to be in the main conference room. Whereas the other two could be in the other rooms making backdoor deals. Essentially the conference took place in multiple chat rooms. However, there was an online forum setup for us to post our country’s general position on an issue or to post a draft resolution. The conference was going along great, lot of students were participating, posting many revisions of draft resolutions and actively debating the topics. But wait there was a twist to the project. The very last day of the conference was to be held in a classroom environment, where we would debate face to face.

Why do this? Well the course instructors explained to us that throughout the years, they have noticed that students who normally don’t talk in class tend to be more outspoken in a virtual environment. This turned out to be true. When we debated the topics in a classroom environment, those who were active virtually, were quite when it came to speaking in front of the class. A simple use of chat rooms and forums empowered those who were shy or intimidated to speak in front of the class to express their views and participate, which they wouldn’t have done otherwise. This also allowed  the few international students, who were in the class to participate.

What is the point of all this? Sometimes the students that barely speak in class have some of the most interesting views, but have a harder time expressing them face to face. Using technologies such as chat rooms, forums, and blogs allow for more participation from these students in the classroom, which results in a healthier discussion within the classroom environment. Finally, I took this course about four years ago, when the concept of web 2.0, social media barely existed.