This event is the brainchild of Fazeley tenant Karl Binder of Adhere Creative. When we first talked about the idea of a digital festival, we wanted to hold an event with a useful outcome and an experimental format, something that provided genuinely useful ideas and action points on how we use social media. Then Karl thought, what if we didn't just come up with new ideas, but a whole new way of generating ideas and so the interactive mindmap event was born.

Soon four top speakers all with a unique take on the issue signed up to speak:

• Marc Reeves: Editor of the Birmingham Post (@marcreeves)
• Jon Hickman: BCU Lecturer and course convenor of the Social Media MA that has attracted national attention (@jonhickman)
• Dave Harte: Digital Birmingham, blogger (@daveharte)
• Jaki Booth: Representing the relative twitter novice (@parboo)

OVERVIEW

The purpose is to run a large interactive event to highlight the benefits of a social media community and how it can cross over from a virtual world to the physical world. Two ways of developing ideas are face to face in a room: here ideas happen quicker and action points are usually agreed in good time - or on a larger scale opening a forum to a larger audience, most likely online: here ideas are far more varied due to the larger amount of people who can get involved. Can we harness the benefits of both to spark a series of innovative and ground breaking project concepts..?

THE PROCESS

1. The Physical Crowd

There is a large white wall. In the centre of the wall, the theme: "my dad's on twitter but he doesn't know why". Four panelists have ten minutes each to brainstorm on why we use social media and how we could use it to better advantage, for ourselves or for our communities. At the end of this 10 minutes the audience have 10 minutes to ask questions, get up and write on the wall or shout things that they want added.

2. The Virtual Crowd

At the same time the event is videostreamed onto the web we have bloggers and tweeters sending out all our thoughts. We invite online followers to feed back into the event with their own thoughts and contributions. This could takes the discussion national or even international.

3. Further Discussion

Post event, brainstorm is put on the web into a virtual mindmap with the picture of our ideas wall. People can continue to add their thoughts for 6 days.

4. Refining the actions and getting on with it

On Wednesday 12th as part of the Fazeley based Digital Britain unconference (blog post to come) we have a session to reflect on the ideas that have come from the event and how we can make them into discrete, do-able action points.

For example, say from the mind map an idea came out to run a workshop for local students to collaborate on a video mashup around the theme of, for example - 'Why I would join a city Gang' - using donated media (video, music, photo, illustrations etc...) then a process will be put in place for this to happen.

5. Report on successes and failures

We use traditional media to inform a different audience

THIS EVENT IS PART OF FAZELEY DIGITAL '09 FESTIVAL. FOR A FULL PROGRAMME PLEASE VISIT WWW.FAZELEYSTUDIOS.COM OR FOR MORE INFORMATION EMAIL KM@FAZELEYSTUDIOS.COM