Sophrosyne Stenvaag ([info]sophrosyne_sl) wrote,
@ 2007-10-21 08:36:00
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Entry tags:diversionarium, events, photos, salon

Saturday Salon: Packing 'Em In
Every time I think the Salons have set an unbeatable standard, the next one comes along to top it!  Yesterday's "Beyond Bionics" shattered attendance records:  we had 44 people, and a peak concurrency of 35, all of them talking at once, I think!

We were joined by the World Transhumanist Association/Second Life, and with the able assistance of our panel, kept the discussion going flat out, well past our 3:30 closing time!

Special thanks to Extropia DaSilva for being fascinating, charming, and for the quote of the day:

Extropia DaSilva: Transhumanism. Is it not just a form of religion for people who trust in the word of the Wachowski Brothers more than Holy Scripture?

Thanks also to my dear Esteban Moody, for bbq-ing some intellectual sacred cows, and for an *exhaustive* list of household tools!  :P 

And, my gratitude to Brielle Coronet for sticking to her guns and challenging the room's consensus with grace, smarts and aplomb!

Finally, and most importantly, thanks to Giulio Prisco for being the *perfect* panelist and bringing a crowd of his own!  Check out his blog for his perspective on the joint event, some more photos, and a good chunk of the chatlog!  We'll collaborate again, I'm sure. 


Next week, watch as we shatter this week's record, with "SexTech: Waaay Beyond Poseballs!"





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[info]http://getopenid.com/dandellion
2007-10-21 05:46 pm UTC (link)
The number of avatars on the sim was 40 at the moment I checked. That was too much for me. Despite that the discussion was interesting, I lost my grip, I simply couldn't follow. :(

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[info]sophrosyne_sl
2007-10-21 07:34 pm UTC (link)
I know, I felt the same way. I tuned out for a long period (dealing with the owners in the aftermath of the griefer, etc.), until the crowd got back down to about 8-10 active participants.

Honestly, I never expected to draw even 20 people consistently, and each week we've been adding to our audience by 25%, tripling the turnout in a month - and "SexTech" could easily crash the sim.

I'm not sure how to handle that: I'm not interested in a more formal lecture/classroom format - plenty of people do that, and I'm opposed to the "expert talking heads" notion and format on principle.

Cap the audience at 20? Seed panelists into multiple simultaneous sessions of 15 or so? I don't know. I'd love suggestions and ideas!

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[info]argent_bury
2007-10-22 03:39 pm UTC (link)
I agree with both of you. There were simply too many people. I largely tuned out and spent time IMing people I already knew at the conference. There were points I wanted to have people expand on, and things I wanted to rebut, but they flew right off my chat window in the general noise.

Perhaps I'm being overly critical, but mostly what I saw was a lot of people proclaiming their own personal views on the singularity, or making witty commentary, but very little meeting of minds or rational dialogue. A discussion just isn't rewarding for me unless one side or the other says "Wow! I never thought of that" or at least "I can see why you might feel that way."

How about some sort of fishbowl format? That way you have a few people (say 3 in SL as opposed to the 5 or 6 of a FL fishbowl) talking and everyone else looking on, and more chance for rational back-and-forth dialogue. Plus, talkers enter and leave the fishbowl on a regular basis so it's not just "meet the experts".

Even using this you would still need to cap the event size, and you would have to make an effort to keep people who are outside the fishbowl generally quiet. Maybe create an "audience group" or "fishbowl group" for people to do IM chat in? As Dande says, some sort of script/software solution may be the way to go.

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[info]argent_bury
2007-10-22 04:30 pm UTC (link)
As Dande says, some sort of script/software solution may be the way to go.

My apologies, that was in fact Giulio who said that. I need to read people's OpenID tags more carefully ^^;

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[info]sophrosyne_sl
2007-10-22 05:33 pm UTC (link)
I'd never heard of that - I like it a lot, and it's a great solution to the problem of scale.

Some of last Saturday may have been that it was an exceptionally talky group, and mostly ideologically pre-sorted. I'll see how next week goes (I'm definitely nervous about it!), and then if this past week *wasn't* an anomaly, actively look for a fishbowl-like solution....

Thanks so much for this, love - great idea!

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Mixed format?
[info]https://openid.equalsyou.com/giulio/
2007-10-22 08:24 am UTC (link)
I agree that separating "experts" and "audience" is often a bad idea, but I think we should find some kind of solution to the problem of everyone talking at the same time, also because this interleaved threads that become difficult to follow in the chatlog. Perhaps like in RL conferences: passing a token to the next speaker, and who has the token has the floor. Easy to implement in software I think.

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Re: Mixed format?
[info]sophrosyne_sl
2007-10-22 05:29 pm UTC (link)
That's a good idea - I'll look into that...

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