Category Archives: First appeared on LDV

Twitter, #ldconf and Heidegger

At our autumn conference last year, this blog introduced a reluctant world to the concept of hashtags. We coined a cumbersome phrase, “hashtag taxonomy” which has dogged us around the political and technical worlds ever since.

By the end of the conference week, I was regretting the phrase utterly. We’d made a simple technology sound complicated, and in doing so had hidden its value from many people who could benefit.

That bad taste in the mouth was extant up until the start of our Spring conference – and brought home to me once more in the words of our founding editor:

A little jealous of #labour20 – if LibDems attempted similar one-day conf the whole day would be spent giggling about “hashtag taxonomies”

From my dimly remembered German degree, Heideggerian terminology has two terms for tools: Zuhanden and Vorhanden. Vorhanden is when something is strange and new. You can see it, but you’re not sure how it works or what it does. It’s that strange feeling when you are learning to drive of a number of controls in front of you, and no sense of how to use them. But once you have been driving for a while, the car becomes Zuhanden: a tool so familiar that you use it without a second thought. It fits your hand comfortably and has become a part of you, not a separate, strange tool.

And that’s exactly what happened with hashtags and twitter at Spring conference.

Helen Duffett announced before Spring conference began that there would be one hashtag for all future Lib Dem conferences:

#ldconf is the hashtag we’ve adopted for this, and all Liberal Democrat Federal conferences. All tweets with this tag can be viewed together at sites like Twitter Search. It’s handy to bookmark the address and refer back to it to see the story developing, through the contributions of many people.

That last sentence of advice proved truer than I guessed. For when conference got underway, we were staggered at the extent to which people were availing themselves of the service. A brief calculation while I write this suggests that there very nearly 1,000 individual messages.

There has been a big increase in the use of Twitter in recent months, fuelled mostly by newspaper reports of celebrities such as Stephen Fry using the service to keep in touch with their fans. One of the clearest indications of just how many people are joining in is related to Fry: at the start of 2009, he launched a competition to celebrate 50,000 followers. Before the competition concluded just days later, he had over 100,000. Although not on that scale, this week both I and @libdemvoice breached the 200 followers mark.

As a result, there’s a wider community of people to talk to each other on twitter, and this weekend, using the hashtag, that’s precisely what they did. The previously strange technology is now so zuhanden that dozens of people used the hashtag during the conference, generating hundreds and hundreds of short messages. The hashtag even “trended” – that is to say it became so popular that it was amongst the most widely used tags in the world.

There were some notable successes. @mattraines warned us of poor restaurants – three nights in a row. (Although interestingly, he and web business partner Tim Prater seemed to eat together one night and twitter contradictory reviews!)

At least two fringe events twittered most of their proceedings – our Obama fringe (which you can also hear in full in our podcast) – and the Social Liberal Forum’s inaugural fringe meeting, tweeted in full by James Graham using the @soclibdem account.

But for me, the most striking use of twitter during the weekend occurred during the 5-19 Education policy debate – which was referred to by many as the faith-schools debate. During the two hours the debate lasted, a separate mini-debate raged across Twitter, with many of those involved in the conference hall listening to platform speakers and immediately responding by twitter.

Here’s a comprehensive selection:

tomstubbs: Will be flying this time tomorrow! I need a holiday!!!!!!! Vince needs to be promoted to god! #ldconf
jamesgraham: @tomstubbs Vince as God? That would explain why he likes faith schools. #ldconf
ExtraBold: Speaker claims Am 3 is compromise offering equality. Rubbish! Am 3 perpetuates discrimination. Vote F12 unamended. #ldconf
BridgetFox: #ldconf listening to schools debate. Packed hall, real debate. How to give choice while banning some choices?
theChristophe: listening to 5-19 Education debate at #ldconf so many amendments, so many points, wondering how to vote.
ExtraBold: Farhana Hoque supporting F12 Equity and Excellence, unamended, pls. #ldconf http://short.to/1t5d
BridgetFox: #ldconf farhana from Islington makes point that class and wealth the real enemies of fairness in schools, not faith.
JonBall: stonking pro-secular intervention at #ldconf
ExtraBold: F12 unamended has a broad coalition of liberal beleivers and liberal atheists behind it http://www.accordcoalition.org.uk/ #ldconf
duncanhames: slamming the LSC’s failure to fund the teaching of dozens of sixth formers and colege students in Wiltshire at Lib Dem conference. #ldconf
imrankhan85: amused at how everyone thinks theirs is the ‘compromise’ option on faith schools. #ldconf
snapesbabe: #ldconf the whole education motion has been hijacked by those with a religious agenda. Ffs
nickjbarlow: Schools debate very interesting – lots of different views and can’t work out how the final vote will go. #ldconf
jeremyharg: #ldconf Is the passion of St Vince really going to push the party – for the 3rd time – into simply having no policy in this major area?
ExtraBold: Vince appears not to have read the motion. It allows people to choose faith schools. #ldconf Support unamended
tennanta: The education bill must be unamended. Let’s have debate in schools. Any other option is a vote for intolerance or injustice. #ldconf
nickjbarlow: Some of these arguments are straying into ‘don’t do what’s right, do what won’t offend the Mail’ territory #ldconf
jamesgraham: Seeing atheist friend go to church just so they can get their kids into local schools. Amazed so many LDs are okay with this. #ldconf
jeremyharg: #ldconf How many times can you put off a decision about this? Thank goodness Lib Dems today resisted the temptation to do so AGAIN…..
tennanta: Tim Farron – reactionary much? #ldconf
jamesgraham: Farron’s language was ridiculously over the top in terms of personal invective. Would vote his amendment down on principle. #ldconf
imrankhan85: @jamesgraham go on, vote 2. intellectual and social freedom for children is more important than parental choice. edu is abt students #ldconf
davethehowarth: Evan harris has just asked Conference to support David Laws’ motion.. Never thought i’d see the day #ldconf
jamesgraham: I don’t remember the last time I was here for a count. Exciting! #ldconf
jamesgraham: I also don’t remember the last time Vince Cable was on the losing side of an argument. He must be mortal after all. #ldconf
willhowells: Tense voting taking place in the hall. I’m busy scripting a zombie stewards horror film. #ldconf
ianeiloart: Amendments 1 & 2 fell. Now counting a close vote on part 1 of amendment 3. On selection in faith schools. #ldconf
caronmlindsay: @willhowells This is really exciting – let us know the result asap #ldconf
ianeiloart: I voted against 1&2, in favour of part 1 of 3. Will vote against part 2 of amendment 3. #ldconf. 4 defeated awaiting count. #ldconf
jeremyharg: #ldconf Impressive performance by Laws. Interesting day for the party’s relationship with him.
BridgetFox: #ldconf result: We’re keeping faith schools but with local authority control of admissions
libdems: 5-19 education policy has been passed by conference with the first part of amendment 3 #ldconf

A final footnote – the easiest way to watch this was at the time.  I can’t immediately find a place that will let me link to an historic hashtag debate.  Neither can I find a site that will quickly summarize for me exactly how many people used a hashtag in any given period.  But it certainly felt at the time as if more people used the spring hashtag before spring conference even began than used the autumn conference hashtag in the entire week that conference lasted.

Conference Catchup

A brief window of opportunity arises in between arriving home and quality time spent with the family before a day spent on the budget at Council tomorrow and another conference (Are you going to the LGA Fire Conference in Bristol? See you there!). The window of opportunity is apparently called Larkrise to Candleford.

So, if you were terribly busy during conference, (because, eg, you were at conference) here’s what you missed.

12 second videos
Kudos to Helen Duffett this weekend. She not only trained hundreds of delegates, organised formal and informal meetups of bloggers, tweeted, twitpicked and worked like a dervish – she also persuaded Nick Clegg and Howard Dean to use the brand new 12 second internet service that’s sweeping the nation. No matter how busy you are, you have 12 seconds to spare, right? We also made this one of me clicking my fingers, and you are probably too busy for that.

Audio files
We podcast Howard Dean’s speech as soon as we could after he gave it.

We also made a recording of our successful inaugural fringe event, “Lessons learned from the Obama campaign.” You can listen to both of these in your web browser – or why not put them on your iPod to listen to whilst delivering leaflets? Search for Lib Dem Voice in the iTunes Store.

Video coverage
So far we have videos of the speeches by Howard Dean and Simon Hughes. In the fullness of time, more will be available.

Session coverage
Alix has typed her fingers to the bone this weekend, as well as taking on the stressful position of chairing a fringe meeting. So don’t miss her wonderful write-ups of as many of the major conference events as possible:
Friday night
Higher education
Howard Dean
Vince Cable
Schools paper – our 5-19 education policy
Sunday morning
Nick Clegg’s speech

#ldconf Podcast: our Obama fringe in full

Now that we are home, and have access to slightly more reliably computers than our trusty laptops using the over-subscribed conference centre network, we can poke around a bit more and find out what was stopping us bringing your the recording of our highly successful fringe meeting last night.

If you were following our twitter feed, you may already have seen a series of short messages giving the outline, but we are now very pleased to bring our the full recording.

As our twitter readers will know, we booked a woefully inadequate room for the fringe: all but alone in our time slot, far more than the 60 we had seats for came to hear our speakers. Conference centre staff, concerned for the safety of those present, asked us to remove half of the people in the room, then removed a dividing wall so that we could have twice the space planned. And this, too, was not big enough for all who came, and we had a large number of people standing.

As you join the evening, the wall had just fallen, people sat down, and Alix asked the audience for a show of hands – who’s read the site? and who never has? The audio recording cannot unfortunately show the answer – which was about half and half. And that’s actually a good thing: the reason we thought it was worth paying a fair amount of money to hold a fringe meeting was to expose Lib Dem Voice to still more of our core audience.

Do enjoy the recording – and let us know what you think.

Comprehensive conference coverage

The party has excellent comprehensive coverage on a vote-by-vote basis on the main party website.

You can find it here.

There is a rather more irreverent live coverage coming from a small army of party twitterers using the hashtag #ldconf. They are telling us about fringes as they happen. They are giving key phrases from set piece speeches. And they are reviewing restaurants almost chew by chew.

You can read these comments from individuals by following this link.

Howard Dean – speech in full

We are very pleased to bring you in haste a rather bootleg version of Howard Dean’s speech to Lib Dem conference in full, recorded by sitting in the audience with a tape recorder.

As these things often go, the effect of recording it in this way means sometimes the audience members are easier to pick out of the recording than the principle speaker. And I’m bringing this recording to you so quickly that I have not been able to listen all the way through yet.

Twitter came alive during the speech, with many people picking out key phrases and retweeting them. You can read them by following this link.

Howard Dean in under 12secs

Continuing our exciting use of new technology, Helen Duffett brings Howard Dean to the 12seconds.tv platform
Video: Governor Howard Dean talks to @libdemvoice. #ldconf on 12seconds.tv

It’s nice to know he’s enjoying his time here. I’ve heard many positive reports from his private meetings with party staff, and we’re waiting with bated breath for the reports of his meeting with bloggers.

And of course in just over 30 minutes, he’ll be speaking from the main platform. I’m planning to be sitting in the auditorium with my mic so that we can podcast his words later this afternoon.

Aunty examines Wikipedia

An interesting piece on the BBC website examines Wikipedia for accuracy

After a slightly outrageous start, the piece settles down into a reasonably balanced look at the internet’s famous anyone-can-edit encyclopaedia.

And whilst errors remain, by and large the biggest mistakes are corrected reasonably quickly, and intentional vandalism overturned almost immediately.

Of particular note to Liberal Democrats will be bizarre quotes about Nick Clegg – now removed. There’s also a long and intriguing section about Martin Horwood MP’s entry on the site:

Liberal Democrat MP Martin Horwood was alarmed to discover his Wikipedia entry, which in keeping with the conventions of the site was not written by him, had been altered in a way he believed would harm his chances of retaining his seat.

Goodness, whatever was said?

And finally, this article came to our attention because it quotes one of the Team:

Mark Pack, the Liberal Democrats’ internet guru, argues that the site had a much better track record than most newspapers, when it comes to corrections.
“Wikipedia is probably more prone to errors than other sources, but it is also much more prone to correcting errors,” he says.
But he adds: “There is a tendency to only see it as acceptable to remove information if it is factually incorrect or extremely trivial.”

UPDATE: Via the medium of Twitter (naturally) we learn the views of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales:

@markpack good quote in the bbc story – you are right about the strengths – and weaknesses of wikipedia bios

Chris Davies podcast

Readers in search of interesting audio material will find two excellent interviews with Chris Davies MEP on Andy Carling’s blog, firstly on the situation in Gaza, and secondly on the forthcoming Euro elections.

Chris has been blogging about his visits to Gaza, and speaks about it in the interview. He sees Gaza City as a potential conference city – so perhaps we can schedule that into the currently empty slot for Lib Dem conference in 2011?

Call for contributions

If you’re planning to be in Harrogate this weekend at Spring Conference, don’t forget that LDV welcomes guest submissions on most topics. We can’t be everywhere at once so we actively encourage conference goers to submit articles. And if you’re at home watching from afar, why not pen a piece on how conference is perceived from without the bubble?

As at previous conferences, the LDV team will be filing copy, but will have to wait until we arrive in Harrogate to work out what just what facilities we have. Will it be a cupboard under the stairs? Will we be sitting on the edges of our beds in a dingy B&B somewhere hopefully pointing our laptops at the corner of the room in a desperate attempt to get next-door’s unsecured wifi to work? Or will this year be the year when Conf Office get the Leader’s suite mixed up with the LDV Cupboard and we get glorious luxury? Tune in next week…

Whatever we get, we will be doing our best to keep you posted with all the news from conference with opinion pieces, reportage, podcasts, tweets… and maybe a few more new multimedia tricks and turns.