So I'm sitting here in my hotel room. Quite exhausted from four days of networking, of being a YAP hostess, of being a speaker/panelist and all the stress that entails, of just being so "on" all the time. You know what I'm saying - whether attendee, staff or speaker, everyone gets into that "conference mode" where you don't want to miss a minute of it, you don't want to waste an opportunity to talk to people you may not see very often. It's not even about going to all the sessions (there are always too many anyway, you just can't go to everything). And I have not had a chance to see any of Miami yet, hopefully tonight I will have a little while to wander down South Beach way.

So anyway, I was thinking (like a good blogger should) about what I could write about now that would be some useful takeaways. Like maybe some "great ideas" that I heard. But I'm finding it hard to think about this conference like that.

Instead, there were a couple of "themes" (perhaps not the right word) that have stood out for me.

The first was the massive impact, pervasiveness and potential of Twitter. On the one hand, for me personally, this is the second time (after The Technology Conference (Tech09) last month) that using Twitter throughout has really replaced live blogging. It's like blogging really is much more about analyzing and synthesizing information afterwards, and I suspect I'll have more I want to write about later. But in terms participating in providing useful (mostly) to-the-minute content, I think we all did a good job of that. Live-tweeting became not only a way of interacting with friends and colleagues, finding out which sessions were cool, figuring out where to meet for dinner, etc. but also a way to take notes during a session and share them in real time with people who couldn't be here. The conference trended several times, which was really awesome for what is a relatively tiny conference NOT about technology (if Tech09 hadn't trended I would have been disappointed; the fact that Great Ideas did is truly awesome). What does that mean? It means that #ideas09, the hashtag for this conference, was one of the top ten things people were talking about on Twitter at given moments over the last four days. There are millions of people on Twitter. This little conference of 400 people was talked about more on Twitter at certain times than the Oscars. That's pretty damn cool.

Here's another thing about Twitter. We always talk about it adding a new layer of content/conversation/participation over the "official" conference content - but this was the first time that we could really SHOW that to people who might not have been aware of it in real terms. What I mean is that we early adopters have been using Twitter for quite a while and it's been like a club, like something we and our buddies know is cool but have had a hard time, sometimes, showing other people how awesome and powerful it is. But here's an example of how that worked here. Yesterday I was in Lindy's session on Blogging and Twitter. I randomly took it upon myself (ha) to live tweet the session, but Lindy also told people they could tweet me questions should they not feel like asking them out loud, and I tweeted that I would relay questions from Twitter, from people who were not at the conference or not in the room, should there be any. And there were! So we were able to really show how people NOT in the room were listening and participating, asking questions and giving feedback. It was a pretty amazing thing to watch, a really simple thing but with so much potential.

Here's another way we showed how it could be used: towards the end of the session Lindy powered up the Twitter search stream for #Ideas09 - which updates in real time. So everyone could see that not only could you expand the reach of this particular session, but you could participate in an ebb and flow of conversation which was going on concurrently related to the other sessions happening at that moment, and also hallway conversations (which are often the place where the most important ideas appear but which have until now been impossible to record). I think there's lots of potential for energizing a conference using Twitter in a more strategic way, too, rather than have more noise than signal, so to speak, but just looking at this Twitter stream updating was illustrating in a very direct way that even if you are not using this personally or for your organization, it's all happening around you regardless. I think (actually I know for sure) that this was a really great way to show the value of Twitter and to help people get started.

So if the first "theme" for me was the power of Twitter as a wave washing over everything, the second "theme" was quite the opposite - a little idea that came up a few times but just peeked up out of the stream of conversation like a prairie dog getting the lay of the land. A little idea that has the potential to become a huge idea.

What was it? you ask: it was the idea of a conscious shifting from the concept of "the member" to that of "the citizen". It came up in our bloggercon (actually the whole session was really great, lots of really interesting thoughts on the future of associations). It came up in the volunteerism lounge. It came up in Patti Digh's wonderful keynote speech - the idea that crowdsourcing is like barnraising. It came up in several other conversations around "what does it mean to be a member?" and "what does it mean to volunteer"?... Here's the thought. What if we could shift the theoretical focus from the membership model to the citizenship model - in other words, I am a member of Costco, but that's not being a "citizen" of Costco, is it! I can see being a citizen of an association. I understand that being a citizen has all the implications of wanting to volunteer, to participate, to give money and time, to be a content creator or a "sharer" or a commenter; and it has all the implied interactions inherent in being part of a group - the networking, the social, the face-to-face events, the learning, the professional development, the leadership, the belonging, the responsibility etc. And the value proposition becomes not just the individual bits of content that people pay for but the community that provides a safe space for all of these interactions to happen.

Anyway I'll leave it there. It's only just a kernel of a concept right now - we'll see if anything comes of it, but I think it might. I think it might be huge. Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts on either of these themes!

Originally posted @ Socialfishing...