I had the honor and pleasure of sitting between Mary Abraham and John Gillies at the ARK KM Conference in New York City over the last two days. Mary and John are two of the most prolific and talented live tweeters on the planet. They attend conferences and tweet nearly every word coming from the speaker micro-seconds after they have been spoken. In the last few years, I have gotten an education in KM through twitter by following the tweets of Mary and John and countless others. I have been able to attend many conferences across the planet that I could never have afforded to attend in person, by simply following the Twitter hashtag associated with the conference. It was a real treat to see Mary and John in action. Although, having participated remotely so often, I discovered I have developed a kind of Twitter myopia. I sat in the room and listened to some really terrific presentations, but I didn’t believe a word they said until I read it in a tweet.
On the first day of the conference, I was seated at a table with Mary on my left, John on my right, and David Hobbie (a prolific tweeter in his own right) on the other side of John. I tweeted the following and David and Mary responded.
Let this be a lesson to lazy kids everywhere: If you’re going to mooch off the hard work of others, never ever brag about it!
A few notes about this Tweet Stream:
I have edited the stream quite a bit. I flipped it, it is now in chronological order from top to bottom. I removed a lot of redundancies. I removed all straight retweets that added nothing to the original or simply said “Agreed” or “Interesting”. Where I kept a retweet, I removed the original quoted text and indented the retweet beneath the tweet it was referring to. I removed the conference hashtag, except where it was used in reference to the conference itself, or if the hashtag was being commented upon. I kept the back and forth peripheral conversations only when, in my opinion, it added something to the content being presented. Needless to say, I cut a lot and I was probably inconsistent throughout, so don’t hold me to anything I just said. I think what remains is a pretty good set of notes from a terrific group of note takers and some really wonderful presentations.
I have copied the Title, Description, and Presenters from the Agenda and entered them into the Tweet Stream in the appropriate places.
Our own Toby Brown gave the Keynote on Wednesday, but this stream picks up after his keynote with the first Client Panel. Toby’s ongoing series of blog posts “The Economics of Law and the Future of Legal KM” is a distillation of the Keynote he gave on day one.
The conference began with a mutiny of sorts. After Toby’s keynote the official hashtag of the conference was announced as #ARKKM2012. We pick up our stream, already in progress…
UPDATE: David reminds me in the comments that he and Mary were live blogging summaries of many of the ARK KM presentations on their respective blogs: