PublicMediaCamp

It is hard to believe it was one week ago that we were all coming together in the studios of WOSU@COSI in Columbus Ohio for PubCamp. Setting up for the event that morning I kept wondering how it would go, if people would be as into it as I was and what might come out of it all.

To say that I was pleased with the outcome would be a severe understatement.

First lets look at how it came together:

• The day started with about 100 attendees chatting over breakfast and then assembling to create the day’s schedule. Using Open Space we managed to fill up about 24 sessions with topics ranging from Social Media 101 to engaging under served communities; from Disaster Response to Somali Refugees.
• The participants were as diverse a field as the topics and because of this every conversation was filled with a wide field of perspective.
• We were also fortunate to have a variety of geographical locations represented. We hosted several participants from Washington DC, St Louis, Indianapolis, and other points across Ohio and the Midwest.
• The facilities at COSI are top notch and provided us with ample room to hold several concurrent sessions and capture much of it on video along with the well setup WiFi connectivity allowing everyone to tweet and blog throughout the day.
• The end of the day feedback suggested that participants would’ve been happy to have had even more time to continue talking – and for some of us we did just that, heading to a local eatery to keep going.

So what came out of it all? I can only speak for myself on this one but I’ve got several new friends and co-conspirators for projects that we feel are going to make our communities a little better. This includes an opportunity to work with some educators on teaching the use of collaborative tools for their students group projects, the facilitation of some more Open Space events for the purpose of teaching connection based leadership and the possibility of some more writing opportunities.

WOSU has hinted at hosting another PubCamp in the future. If you weren’t able to make it to this one I wouldn’t recommend missing out the next time around. St Louis will be hosting the next PubCamp so keep your eyes out for announcements about that and maybe we’ll see you there!