DRMacIver's Notebook
Notes on Tweeting Too Much At Conferences
Notes on Tweeting Too Much At Conferences
Well, PyCon UK, the best conference, is over for another year. Sad face.
This year I ended up doing something with a surprising amount of impact on my and others’ experience of the conference: I tweeted a lot. Yes, I know, even by my standards. I essentially became the unofficial scribe of the conference. I won’t even attempt to embed them, but here’s a search query that will give you everything I tweeted on the conference hash tag for this conference.
Each day:
- Yay! It’s time for the annual week of visiting Brodie’s to begin. Oh and #PyConUK is on too.
- It is with Brodies alone I set my mind in motion. #PyConUK day two begins! Get ready for more fun-filled and eclectic thread of conference highlights.
- I pledge allegiance to the coffee of #PyConUK, and to the community for which it stands, one nation undivided under Brodies. Day three begins!
- #PyConUK day four. Yr hmbl crspndt is nursing a splitting headache (not a hangover, honest!) and sadly Brodies won’t sell me coffee by the pint. Fortunately I’m sure (NikoletaGlyn?)’s keynote will be nice and gentle and contain no advanced mathematics.
- Good morning #PyConUK day 5! Is everyone hyped and enthus-[Error. Insufficient coffee. Insert Brodies provided latte to continue. Error. Error. Errrroooooorrrrrrrrr…]-iastic for the sprints today?!
- #PyConUK day… six? Wait, there is no #PyConUK day 6. That must mean #PyConUK is… over? I don’t understand. What will I live tweet now? … Maybe some coffee from Brodies will help.
Why? Well, I’d been talking recently about how conference organisers put up with a lot and a point that got made in response to this is that a really helpful thing for attendees to do is tweet about the conference - it helps get more sponsors next year, promotes the ideas of the conference, and generally raises its profile. This seemed an easy enough thing to do, so I decided to give it a try and got a little bit carried away.
People seemed to really like me doing this. Especially the organisers - I heard from a lot of them that the running commentary helped them feel more in touch with the conference. So if this achieved nothing else then I’m happy with it. It also was appreciated by people who weren’t able to make the conference, and in a few cases to those who would never have come because they weren’t even programmers (though I of course still think they should come)!
People have asked me how I did it, but it’s not really complicated: I had a laptop, I touchtype really fast, and I’ve wasted far too much of my life on Twitter. I had not previously thought the latter was a professional skill, but apparently.
I did have a couple of problems with doing it:
- Twitter threading is awful. I’m not sure how much it helped people. I think I will probably not bother threading this the next time I do it, and I screwed up the threading in a bunch of places.
- Quoting people in real time is basically impossible. I am not a STTR. I ended up paraphrasing a lot and I’m not sure I was clear enough about that.
- I tried to distinguish where I was reporting what the speaker was saying versus when I was commenting. I did not always remember to do this.
- I would like other people to do this too next year. I’m concerned that this gave people a very DRMacIver-flavoured view of the conference. This is especially relevant because I think for a variety of reasons (mostly that I rarely go to technical talks) I missed out on a lot of first-time speakers.
On the whole though, this level of live-tweeting seems to have been popular, and I will probably do it again at future conferences I attend.