Scribbling on flipcharts or sticking ideas on Post-it notes are well established ways of capturing and organising thoughts and ideas in group discussions, conferences and workshops. It’s effective too, except when it comes to organising, summarising and sharing all the knowledge captured on these bits of paper. Quite a lot of flipchart paper ends up in rolls under the desk waiting for someone with time to analyse and transcribe.
This got me thinking that there must a world beyond the flipchart. We already have smart boards and collaborative writing tools. Why not use them? It’s a short jump to realise that Tweeting from an event using a hashtag is much the same as posting your thoughts on a wall. What else could we use? Well, there’s Audioboom to capture soundbites, Vine for short video. And then we have great tools for aggregating web-based content: Storify and Medium, for example. Capturing thoughts and ideas digitally makes sharing easier and less time consuming.
This way of doing things is becoming quite well established and even has its own term: Social Reporting. So we’ve started experimenting and what we’ve learned so far is that social reporting does require planning so that participants understand that it’s an integral part of the event, not a gimmicky add-on.
Of course, scribbling on paper, whether notebook or flipchart, is still perfectly valid. Indeed pens, pencils and paper are vital tools as explained in this video, How The Way You Write Changes the Way You Think. As ever, digital doesn’t necessarily supplant analogue, but social media offers us so many additional ways of capturing and sharing. For example the Post-it people have created an app (iPhone only at present) that will capture up to 50 post notes and split them into individual notes that you can organise and share. Ideas don’t stop when the meeting ends says the publicity blurb.
We have drafted a guide to how it works and we’ll be trying some of the ideas at Small Changes, Big Differences on 26 February. Follow the hashtag #scbd15.
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