Hello, all.
I'm Alex Halavais, at UB. My interests, broadly defined are in collective
innovation and creativity, especially in terms of how new organizational and
epistemological structures emerge among groups. I am interested in, for
instance, how a heterophilous group of people manage to organize a
conference that doesn't look too much like conferences that have come before
it :). I'm interested in a bunch of other stuff, much of which (though not
all) can be found on my web site (http://alex.halavais.net/news/).
Following on Katrien's comments, I think that there is an optimal point for
people to meet face-to-face, and for that time to be most effective, the
virtual interaction has to have advanced to a certain degree. I'm not sure
what that degree is, but it means that the ice has been broken and the
descriptive work has been accomplished such that the face time can be used
to effectively avoid talking in circles or catching participants up (the
latter of which seems to be the mode of most academic conferences). In some
ways, I think our own interaction--virtual and physical--might act as a
model for that of the conference.
Trebor: Space is an important issue, especially now that they are trying to
price it out internally. I suspect that with backing from folks in CAS and
elsewhere we can avoid that, but now is definitely the time to be firming up
the space issues for April. Do you and Geert have ballpark numbers of
participants expected? Are Bruce Pitman or Jay Turkkan aware of the
conference? I've been involved in planning a series of small (~100 people)
day-long conferences on the future of scholarly communication, and having
good support from the administration--at the school and university
level--has opened a lot of doors.