Online Journalism Blog

Following my jaunt to Vienna earlier this year, I’ll be flying East again come September 27-28, to the first European Bloggers (Un)Conference, “East meets West”, in Amsterdam, September. Want to join me?

Here’s the blurb:

“The conference will allow bloggers from the European Union and its neighbour countries to meet, share ideas and discuss new media developments in their respective countries. The event will focus on issues common to bloggers and citizen journalists from East and West, as well as on vital differences.“The workshop will include a showcase of “best practices,” keynote speakers and chances for bloggers to meet face-to-face. We have four initial tracks:

• “Citizen Journalism: How and When It works”
• “Blogging in Dangerous Places: Security Issues”
• “Future of Media: Old vs. New”
• “Building Successful Web2.0 applications””

As it’s an ‘Unconference‘, I won’t be speaking formally as such, but more engaging in “hands-off moderation”, as one of the organisers writes.

“Our idea is to have a good bit of pre-conference communication being done on a Wiki — have people contribute agenda items, possible mini-presentations to the agenda pages of each track. Your role as a moderator would be to see that there is a minimum adherence to to the goals and objectives of each track rather than to streamline the discussion, which we definitely don’t want to do.”

“So the moderator would play a somewhat ice-breaking role at the beginning, help to establish some goals and priorities for the track, and then hopefully retreat to the retrenches and intervene only if there.”

The Unconference is part of the PICNIC conference, which is a major event in the new media calendar, so there are plenty of other events to peek in on too.

If you want to attend (it’s free), sign up at the bottom of the conference wiki. At the moment it’s very East-biased so more Westerners are needed.

And if you’re going to be at PICNIC anyway and want to meet up, let me know.