One quick thought about the format of the VJAM session...
The day was very free-format which had both pros and cons. Read Alex Bainbridge's post about the day
if you'd like to know more about how the day worked for him - and the pros and
cons of this. He found it quite frustrating - and I can understand
some of these feelings.
One thing that concerned me during the day was that all this great discussion and interaction was taking place in multiple locations and it wasn't being captured. Looking at the ideas wall at the end of the day though I was impressed at the amount of post-its and drawings up there. Using three 'visualisers' - people sketching interpretations of ideas being discussed was a really interesting idea. And I think it worked well.
But what about the discussions post-event? What about people posting on blogs? I'd have liked to be able to stay connected to such a diverse, smart and interesting bunch of people. I exchanged a few business cards, but there were plenty of other people I didn't get chance to talk to.
I personally would have set up a forum of some sort - or at least a simple site where RSS feeds are used to aggregate posts from blogs post-session. No need for it to have a long lifespan - but to me it would have made so much sense - creating an on-line space like this - particularly given that the day was all about social spaces on-line anyway!
I'm going to let NESTA and Virgin know I've posted here... so maybe they will respond.
5 thoughts on “VJAM – taking the debate further”
Comments are closed.
How about a hashtag http://hashtags.org/ or a straightforward every post after the event should contain a tag VJAM2008 on it. And then RSS via a google news alert every blog post that includes such a tag. Or if people have time they should delicious every post they do with a common tag.
Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for posting your thoughts about Vjam. I don't think we had a chance to meet on the day but I am part of the Nesta team that was responsible for making it happen. Anyway, just a quick post to say that Friday was very much just the start of the process so I agree that the discussion and debate needs to be taken further. More on that soon.
Having been at another unconference the day before (www.amplified08.com), also at Nesta, I'm all unconferenced out but enjoyed them both and will blog about them as soon as I can at http://blogs.nesta.org.uk/connect/. Anyway, thanks again and nice fish! ;)
Roland
We saw last Friday’s event as the just the start of the V-JAM project and definitely not the whole deal. V-JAM is all about user lead innovation and so we are keen to allow ‘users’ and other participants to lead the process and help determine with us what happens next. If people want an online forum, we can definitely provide that but if people want to go away in small groups to continue their conversations in whatever way they want then that’s fine too. Perhaps individuals want to work on ideas that originated from the event on their own? The point is, we didn’t (and still don’t) know exactly what was/is going to happen. We were keen not to create a very controlled, pre-determined and potentially very constraining process as this is a new concept that we’re trying for the first time.
We have learnt a lot but rely on feedback from people like you to help us to learn more, so thanks again. This isn’t the end of V-JAM so expect to hear from us again soon.
whats a v-jam
Hi Sara
See my previous post...
http://travelblather.com/2008/11/virginatlantic-brand-social-spaces.html
Thanks
Jeremy