It’s been a busy autumn, traditionally the conference season, and I’ve been asked to live blog a lot of events this year. Before we close down for the Christmas break I thought it would be good to look back at some of the events I’ve attended and live blogged this year. Here are four that may be of interest, they were certainly packed full of useful advice and information, much of which is now available online.
Interested in why people ask me to live blog events? Read this article on Five Reasons why Live Blogging Matters.
Workplace Trends 2014: Designing for Inclusion
This is the fourth year I’ve been live blogging this high profile conference for the workplace design and analysis community, and every year the involvement online has increased.
The conference this year included a Pecha Kucha session, so in addition to the nine key speakers (including my old friend Steve Maslin who blew the audience away with his talk about designing for everyone) and the traditional after-lunch debate between Paul Morrell and Paul Finch, there were another ELEVEN six minute Pecha Kucha speakers, each with 20 slides and plenty to say. As you can imagine it was a herculean task to share all this wonderful content with the audience on twitter, and I couldn’t have done it alone.
This year we doubled the number of people tweeting with the hashtag (to 298) and those people produced almost 2000 tweets during the day. As a result the event reached over 700,000 twitter users in the few days during and afterwards, a fantastic achievement. This year’s Workplace Trends Conference was the most successful ever on Twitter.
I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the online elements of this event, whether in the room or around the world. We hope that enthusiasm for the event will encourage even more workplace professionals to attend next year.
- Read the Live Blog
- Find out more about the event
- Event Statistics
- Watch Last year’s (2013) presentations on Youtube
The event sparked some brilliant blog posts including this from the ‘Workstock’ Pecha Kucha participant Doug Shaw. Read the first blog post by Doug here and a second one about the Art and Soul of Work here and see his excellent short talk (talk/sing/draw) below.
RIBA Journal Morning Seminar: 8 Steps to a #PerfectRoof
My client SIG Design and Technology is partnering with the RIBA Journal to offer their readers impartial, useful advice on roofing design, including membranes, green roofs and zinc, copper and stainless steel roofing and cladding. As part of this activity they organised a morning seminar called ‘8 Steps to the #PerfectRoof’ a concept I developed with them to help describe their ‘product neutral’ free design and specification service in full.
The event, chaired by Ruth Slavid, included brilliant case study presentations from three architects –
- Peter Hall of Van der Steen Hall Architects in Devon on a beautiful earth sheltered house,
- Ben Stuart of MAKE Architects with a fascinating and detailed introduction to Hot Melt roofing and its use on the huge UBS Bank building at 5 Broadgate in the City of London, and
- Andrew Boardman of AWW Inspired Environments who took us through the use of zinc rainscreen cladding at the new Imperial Tobacco HQ in Bristol.
Alongside these three great speakers we had three in house talks on various aspects of roofing design and construction, all tying in to the 8 steps to a #PerfectRoof concept.
Useful swag! #PerfectRoof pic.twitter.com/iP7UQcULBD
— SIG Design&Tech (@SIGDesignTech) October 22, 2014
What surprised me about this event was how interested and engaged the audience were. They asked loads of challenging and clearly important questions of the experts, and overall the event was very positively received.
- Find out more about the #PerfectRoof concept by visiting the SIG Design & Technology dedicated pages.
- Read back through the live blog, which is full of useful roofing and cladding design resources.
- SIG Design & Technology have a blog about flat, green and metal roofing design. You can subscribe here.
#NBSLive 2015
NBSLive is now in its second year. Hosted by RIBA Enterprises and the NBS, NBSLive is aimed at architects and construction professionals interested in learning in one day about a wide range of topics from over 60 speakers.
The programme last year was split into four themes and this year was no different, they were (with links to the programme):
As last year I worked with a team from NBS who tweeted on the @theNBS account, one in each room to cover all the topics, whilst I moved from room to room to help share a variety of content with the online audience.
There were over 200 people attending the event, and to have 236 people tweeting 1500 times with the hashtag was amazing, showing the breadth of interest in the topics on Twitter. The two keynotes by Tristram Carfrae of Arup and Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects were particularly popular.
- Visit the NBSLive Microsite to find out more about the event
- Read my stats blog post from the 2013 inaugural NBSLive
- View the 2014 Live Blog here
- If you’re interested in the BIM activities from NBSLive Stephen Hamil has written a blog post with links to other writeups.
Promat #FireDay
Client and fire protection specialist Promat UK held their #FireDay this autumn too, in the spectacular surroundings of Ascot racecourse.
I was invited to provoke some discussion on the topic of social media in construction with a keynote, before the delegates got stuck into a day of fire related presentations and discussions including:
- Fire rated glass and its use in architectural design
- BIM – The interaction between the specifier & the passive fire protection community (a talk by Peter Capelhorn of CPA)
- A National Competency Register for passive fire protection installers (I was amazed that there isn’t one!)
- A new White Paper on Steel Protection
- CE Marking & EN Testing – When will it become mandatory for fire protection products? (again I’d have thought this would be a given but apparently not)
- Education and Training in the Fire Protection Sector
'The current construction industry draws everything 2.5 times and builds everything 1.5 times' #BIM #Fireday pic.twitter.com/U6y9KlDNVB
— Su Butcher (@SuButcher) November 12, 2014
The event was chaired by Wilf Butcher (no relation) CEO of The Association for Specialist Fire Protection, and whilst Wilf made the usual jokes about twitter I’m delighted to see not only that ASFP are on twitter but there’s a flourishing fire protection community there including product companies, assessors and installers, many of whom got involved in the event both at Ascot and around the country. There were in total 96 contributors on the #Fireday hashtag who between them sent 385 tweets during the day. As a result we were able to share information about fire protection with over 137,000 twitter users.
#fires @SuButcher Which is why #compartmentation is so important – check out @ASFPUK guidance for all involved in property maintenance.
— Avesta (@AvestaFSM) November 16, 2014
- Read the fascinating Live Blog on Promat’s #FireDay microsite including all the slide decks;
- Check out all the #Fireday tweets in a searchable archive
- Follow @PromatUK and @ASPFUK on Twitter
- Find out more about Promat’s White Paper on the Specification of Steel Fire Protection
It is difficult to fit conference attending and live blogging into my burgeoning consultancy work, but I find it hugely rewarding to see the enthusiasm of conference attendees spread outside the room and reaching across the globe. If you’d like me to Live Blog your event next year, get in touch as soon as you can because we’d love to fit you in.
If you’ve got any questions about live blogging do get in touch or ask them below.
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