Social networkers meet in person at ‘unconference’

The best and worst part about building a community these days is that people who’ve never met, maybe will never meet, can form deep bonds online through blogs, podcasts, video logs, through Wikipedia, through Facebook, through 140 character messages on Twitter. (Tweets, they’re called, if you’re not familiar. Remember it. There will be a test.)

So what happens when those people do meet, in person, in a hand-shaking, exchange-of-ideas-and-business-cards kind of way? It happened Saturday at Kennesaw State University, when more than 300 people gathered during SoCon09, a social media conference created to spur discussion of how we share business, news, experiences — just about anything.

Sure, plenty of these participants are local and have met face-to-face before. They follow each other on Twitter, befriend each other on Facebook, but they don’t usually hang out in groups of 300. So, to start the conference, they set themselves apart.

Well before the conference began, the startup managers, non-profit consultants and marketing whizzes and others added the phrase #socon09 to all their Tweets. Even people who weren’t attending, but wanted to talk about it, could join the conversation.

They organize — kind of.

SoCon09 participants call it an “unconference” because they steer the conversation, create their own topics and sign-up sheets.

Next, they talk.

There were presentations by Jeff Haynie, the chief executive of startup Appcelerator and Andrew Wilson of Atlanta.net, but much of the discussion happened around them, online, in what used to be handwritten notes or hushed whispers. It isn’t audible, but it is powerful, often critical, if not downright snarky.

When Wilson used a Wikipedia definition of social media to say it had less accountability than traditional media, it was challenged out loud by a only a few speakers, but caused a typewritten riot.

What else happens at such an unconference?

They share.

Morning speakers were streamed online at myurbanreport.com. Photos appeared on Flickr, an image-sharing Web site, before lunch. Commenters waited for the microphone so the event could be podcasted.

And then — and this is most important — they keep it going.

They plan to meet later, to talk later, to follow each other online.

Leonard Witt, a Kennesaw State University professor and SoCon09 organizer (unorganizer?), on Saturday announced a $1.5 million Harnisch Foundation grant for Kennesaw State to start the Center for Sustainable Journalism. It will research and test ways to create and distribute news.

The big idea: that “they” can be you, or anybody.

“Sometimes, I think, is it working?” Witt said of the conference, now in its third year. “And the next year, more people come, they’re having active conversations — that’s proof it’s working.”