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Get ready for Live Tag Surfing

 The essence of 2gether08 is helping people connect, converse, collaborate … and we have some great technology to help us, including the Crowdvine networking site where people have already started to make friends before the event: do take a look over here.

However, on the  two days of the Festival we’ll also be using some simple - if skillfully deployed - old-style tools like pens and sticky labels to help people post their ideas, cluster them, start some threads.

Post-its and flip-chart? Not just those - we are talking Live Tag Surfing, as Ed Mitchell explains in a post to our networking site:

When people come out of event sessions, there will be stuff in their heads that they want to share with others, connect over, deepen their understanding of, turn into actions and more.

Live Tag Surfing provides an open platform to facilitate this desire by hosting a huge ‘tag wall’ at the event on which anyone can add one of their (limited number of) tags. By adding a tag, you are saying ‘I want to talk about this - does anyone else?’.

Gradually as the event progresses, more tags will appear. Patterns will emerge; bubbles will begin to surface. The tag wall doubles as a dynamic mindmap of the event, enabling anyone (at the event or not) to gain a high level map of what attendees are thinking about.

The wall will be nurtured and navigated by Dan and I with the noble support of some special invited guests in order to help make sense of it all.

As the patterns emerge in the tags, and the bubbles begin to rise, so the topical conversations can begin - the wall is now a springboard to help attendees self-organise their own breakout conversations based on the patterns in the tags. Attendees will be given bamboo poles with labels on them and let loose to take those ideas forward in any way they chose.

Conversations can bubble up serendipitously, and there will be specific ‘bubble bursting’ moments when we facilitate the breakouts.

Ed says he and Dan Dixon first experimented with Live Tag Surfing at a gathering of Bristol’s Grumpy Man collective in 2007. Are there any pictures, Ed?

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