Just arrived in Liverpool, ready for this year’s TUC Congress (www.tuc.org.uk/congress2009), which is worryingly my eighth one (I hope there’s some kind of medal). I’m pretty chuffed with some work I’ve been doing on a separate site Congress Voices, which aims to collate social media coverage of Congress, linking people here at the event with the millions of UK trade unionists that this parliament of unions represents.
You can find it at www.congressvoices.org , but if you are blogging, Tweeting or Flickring about Congress, it will hopefully find you! I’ve already noticed a few Tweets coming in on the hashtag #TUC09, and any flickr photos shared with user tuc.org.uk will also come to our attention. The site also provides a commentable agenda, where users can have their say on the motions under debate, which is another first.
It’s built (on next to no cash) around the Open Source platform WordPress (including some great work on using it as a consultation tool by the BIS Social Media Team), with links in to a number of fantastically useful free web services, such as Feedburner, Yahoo! Pipes and TidyTweet.
A couple of thousand people will be coming through Congress at some point over the next week, and hopefully this site will help the social media users amongst them (2008 saw half a dozen blogging delegates, hopefully a number that will only grow once you add the mobile-ready Twitterers into the mix) link up with interested web users outside the event, providing more insights, broader perspectives and new ideas on the big issues facing working people at this crucial Congress.
Congratulations on Congress Voices, John. It’s a really impressive social media aggregator around an event, and takes the basic platforms (Ning, Crowdvine, even basic WordPress) a big step further.
It will be great to watch what kind of engagement you get from users during the conference, and maybe to hear your lessons learned for the rest of us to benefit from?