In my opening thoughts, I shared a summary of the “opening salvos” (comments) made by the panel of experts at the ASAE Technology Conference in Washington, DC. From that point the topic moved away from opinion (most of which were pretty solid) to something that resembled a college course called an Introduction to Web 2.0. Admittedly, it was flavored with how the idea of the “interactive web” or what I like to call the “read-write” web can be applied to associations, but afterall that was the reason we gathered together in the first place.

The panel characterized Web 2.0 as:

• a focus on the web not the desktop
• software as a service (SaS) not a package
• a shift to user-generated content and participation
• a movement away from content management as an organizational chore and toward a user function
• collectivism
• a focus on user experience
• the renewed importance of data and the fact that people are the new data

Reggie went on to explain that in his opinion (and I agree) that the technology itself was not new but the way the technology was applied was. Things like links are the new commodity and a key element of the blogosphere. Personally, I like to consider it the democratization of the web…everyone can has a voice and can participate and it’s no longer the realm of those with specialized tools or experience.

The panel did express concern about the fact that despite the advances of technology taking place across the www, much of the association world has not responded (or adopted it) as quickly and as a result, were not ready for participative media and technologies.

The topic then quickly shifted to an introduction of the basic tools, technologies and concepts that have comprised the Web 2.0 (I still think there is a better name for it) phenomenon and differentiate it from the earlier days of the web. The six they decided to cover were:

1. blogs
2. wikis
3. rss
4. folksonomies and tagging
5. social networks
6. mash-ups

Overall, I think these were pretty solid choices to capture the essence of the “interactive web”. Overall, I think the panel did a good job of describing not only what each of the terms meant but also how they are most commonly applied. The more indepth discussion about how each could be applied to the benefit of associations was being saved for the second part of the educational session.

Interestingly, I was pretty impressed by the level of knowledge that both Reggie and Jeff had and how easily they were able to bring it down to a level that would be understood by much of the participants. I also took away an interesting statistic: 25 - 30% of all ages are involved in tagging. I would have expected it to be more of a bell-shaped curve with the majority of tagging being conducted by the 18 to 35 demographic, but the numbers seemed to prove me wrong it’s actually being done by folks of all ages. I am pretty certain that the reference for the statistic came from the Pew Internet Life Project. I will have to take a look at this in greater detail. Thanks Jeff!

The discussion then closed with a pretty lively discussion about issues the attendees would be interested in learning more about in the second part of the session. I didn’t attend part two, opting instead to attend a session on Asynchronous Learning (which I will cover in a separate post), but found the information engaging and for those unacquainted very informative. What I took away from the session was the fact that a number of the panelists really “got it” and much of the audience didn’t. It also leads me to believe that the association world in general has a long way to go to catch-up to other industries and truly leverage the power of interactivity and collaboration made possible by current generation technologies for the benefit of the association and the members.

One interesting side-effect of attending the session was hearing from one of the managers of the IT department that attended the conference and session with me that I should have been up there with the panelists…She was really blown-away that I knew my stuff. It’s nice to know that knowledge is appreciated.

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