Enterprise 2.0 Conference Gets All Social in Its Call for Papers

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference has opened its Call for Papers for the Boston 2010 show. And boy, it’s changing things up. In a good way.

The Conference is using Spigit to manage the collection and selection of proposals for sessions at the Boston event. What this does is make the whole process more transparent, shareable and collaborative. More on that in a minute. First…

Anyone remember what it was like to go through the session proposal process?

• We’d submit our proposals into the SurveyMonkey tool. We then didn’t see them for a while.
• Couldn’t get community feedback to improve your proposal prior to the start of the voting.
• Once the voting began, there were 16 pages of proposed sessions. And each page had like 20 proposals on it. You couldn’t page ahead, so taking the survey was an onerous process.
• If you have an interest in a specific category, it was impossible to drill down to just those proposed sessions in that category.
• You couldn’t share specific proposals with others (“um…page forward to page 13…yeah, middle of the page…you see it?”).
• You had to be ready to decide on every one of the proposals during your one login session, otherwise forget it.

My guess is that most people taking the survey read less than 25% of them. Just too painful.

The Enterprise 2.0 Call for Papers was clearly in need of some…Enterprise 2.0.

Now This Is How We Do It

Much is different in the Boston 2010 Call for Papers process. It’s a much more Enterprise experience for participants. In fact, let’s examine the new process under the FLATNESSES framework, introduced by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Freeform: Each proposed session is entered into an initially blank description field. It’s up to each person what to write. Links and formatting are available. Now there is some structure, as the Enterprise 2.0 Conference has some information it needs for every submission.

Links: Each proposal has its own link, making it shareable on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. Individuals will also have their own social profile, with a unique URL. Links can also be embedded inside each session proposal.

Authorship: All contributions – proposals, comments – on the Call for Papers are linked to the person who made them. This makes it easy to find people with relevant interests.

Tagging: Each submitted proposal can be tagged for extra context. These tags then become part of a tag cloud, and are individually searchable.

Network-oriented: In his blog post, Dion describes this element as “fully Web-oriented, addressable, and reusable”. That describes the proposals for Boston 2010 versus what they were in SurveyMonkey. RSS feeds allow users to follow the action off the site as well.

Extensions: “Extend knowledge by mining patterns and user activity.” The Spigit platform tracks myriad interactions among participants and content. These interactions are part of the wisdom of the crowd used in advancing proposals through the selection stages. The system will also let you know if a proposal potentially matches one you’ve entered.

Search: All proposals and users are searchable. In fact, there are numerous ways to search for proposals: keywords, tags, category, selection process stage, submitter, modification date and others.

Social: Every contribution is associated to a user, a great start for social transparency. Participants have their own profiles on the platform, making it easy for others to understand their background. Commenting is threaded, allowing different conversations to occur. Individuals can connect with one another on the platform, and see an activity stream for all their connections. Individuals can email one another through the platform (while not revealing the source email addresses).

Emergence: The entire philosophy of the platform is emergence. First, session proposals are posted from around the world, subject only to individuals’ initiative. The community then provides feedback, both extrinsic and intrinsic. The crowd rates the proposals (starting January 2010), which is lets the top proposals emerge for selection to the Boston 2010 Conference.

Signals: Following content and users is an important feature for the new Call for Papers process. RSS feeds can track categories, discussion forums and individual proposal changes. The activities of your social network of tracked, making it easy to jump in. Email notifications are also used to track these areas, in case that’s you preferred signal tool.

I’m looking to forward to seeing how the Enterprise 2.0 community leverages the FLATNESSES goodness in the new Call for Papers process. And you can read more about the different Enterprise 2.0 features of the site here.

So get hopping. Enter a proposal or take a look at what others have already submitted.