Review: Live blogging Guild Council
As some of you may have noticed, we tried a basic version of live blogging (when i say basic i mean one man, one laptop and twitter) at the last Guild Council of the year. It proved to be a very valuable experience which we will use to outline our strategy for coverage in the coming year.
I felt that the basic principle was going to work in terms of informing people who are not at Guild Council what is going on, however the 140 character limit on Twitter often proved to be a problem when we could not provide all the relevant information in a tweet – however using a system like Cover it live should fix issues such as this.
other problems were
1) The speed of Guild Council, sometimes things move quite quickly and it proved difficult to keep up – this coupled with trying to decide what is relevant whilst the event is taking place suggests that we need more than one person covering the event.
2) Confusion, sometimes there is confusion over what is going on / being voted on and a quick tweet can actually end up being wrong when the Indy chairs clear up the confusion, i feel however that this may well be a problem with live blogging in general rather than Guild Council specifically.
3) Lack of preparation, – i only had a quick look through the agenda prior to the start, so wasn’t sure what would need coverage and which parts might be better left out. This is something that can easily be rectified through thorough prep work. This should all serve to make the experience more interesting and engaging for those reading and easier for those of us who are live blogging.
4) Pictures – should we be providing them – will it give people a better sense of what is going on, will it enhance the coverage, it is not something i bothered with in the experiment and in all honesty would not have been able to even it i had intended to – i had my hands full keeping up.
Guild Council is a confusing event at the best of times even for its veteran members so it is important we find a way to ensure the coverage we provide does not further confuse people, but rather continues to bring greater understanding and accessibility.
So now we will sit down with these issues in mind and develop our coverage strategy for next year. Your thoughts are of course, welcome.
Your thoughts?
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Photos would certainly not add a great deal to live blogging. As photos would all tend to look the same; a different person stood at the front each time speaking. I do think that Audio/Phone Boo's would be very useful, in particularly for speeches on motions and answers to questions by the exec. This could be performed easily with a phone but you would need to be sat on the front row each time and the 'hippies' may not like the fact you are taking up 'their space'.
On a different note, I think that the live blogging should be reviewed in consultation with R & D when they sort out the minutes for each meeting. We know there are often details missing/ inaccurate bits and bobs and so having the blog as a reference material as well can only serve to enhance the quality of the minutes.
Fair point on the photographs James however i think the audioboos might prove complicated and disruptive – deciding which speeches to cover (no need to do all the motion ammendment / procedual speeches) the phones mics aren't particulary sensitive. We could of course investigate an external mic but then money starts to become an issue.
On the minutes front i agree that it would only serve to increase the accuracy and reccords. However this brings up another point that I forgot to mention earlier – to what degree do we editorialise. Do we blog verbatim, or do we pass opinion / judgement on what goes on?
What would provide a richer / more relevant experince for those following?
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