Having questions from remote participants was a useful auxiliary to the Q&A session at the event, and displaying the channel which provided these was entirely sensible in my view. (I remember you did this with SecondLife chat in the Symposium in 2007 and I thought this approach worked well then too).

Those of us who chose to use other ‘backchannels’ did so in order to have a different sort of conversation. In fact, I made use of less overt back channels in addition to the ‘official’ Coveritlive channel. For that matter, I also indulged in whispered exchanges with people sitting close by. Perhaps this is rude behaviour, but I’ll probably do it in future….

I didn’t detect any dissatisfaction with the way the event was organised at the time and personally thought it was excellent.

I also consider it reasonable for me to comment on impressions I received from discussions at the time, without offering references/evidence/citations. This is one of the reasons I blog!

I hope this was made clear at the start of the day (but as has been noted elsewhere, doing so doesn’t help remote participants who join the day late) and I thought it was announced immediately before it happened at the end of each talk - but again, for various reasons that may not have happened - though one could argue that this is too late anyway.

The intention was that live comments would not be disruptive (in real time) to speakers while they were talking but that since the comments were being made public to virtual participants (including a subset of the RL audience) anyway there was no real reason not to make them public to the whole audience?

BTW I (as a remote participant) hadn’t realised that the Coveritlive content was being displayed for all to see. I’m slightly concerned that this happens, even though I appreciate that the discussions take place in an open environment. But that’s a separate debate.

I think the core/chore dichotomy forms an interesting frame for this discussion.

SaaS in its Web2.0 guise seems to challenge conventional wisdom in this respect. When I worked in IT support we tended to consider outsourcing the ‘chore’, while developing the core in-house. The rationale was that we concentrated our efforts on the core. Your model, and I think you may be right, seems to reverse this, in HE at least.

Interesting that one of the most successful SaaS services to date, Salesforce.com, would seem to be squarely in the provision of chore services….

How you build a “service”, with published service definitions and reference to service catalogs etc (in ITIL terms) when you’re reliant on “consuming” a raft of external services is lost on me. However, if you want to be distinctive in your service offering - you must find a way of incorporating Web 2.0 apps into it. Furthermore, you need to be mindful of the mix between “core” and “chore”, this is the theme that Joe Nicholls and I have been discussing recently (including at the very same Eduserv Foundation meeting - #efsym2008).

What appears to me to be evident is that Web 2.0 fits into what is the new “core”, whilst everything to do with business efficiency and effectiveness (”chore”) should have little to do with Web 2.0 and therefore outsourced SaaS. Whether Gmail or Google Docs (or the Microsoft offerings) count as candidates for the latter category is open to debate - but this may change over the next couple of years - particularly if the governance issues (as Chris Adie discussed) are addressed.

I think therefore that SaaS has a definite place to play in our service portfolio, in the new “core” - the personal working environment; if not the “chore” - the modern working environment.

I had no particular expectation on the day and did, I believe, manage to maintain my professional objectivity!

2:50 [Comment From john morse (online)]
is he suggesting that insitutions restrict access to web (2.0) sites

2:52 [Comment From Michael Webb (at event)]
@john - no, I don’t think so!
2:52 [Comment From Brian Kelly (online-only)]
@John Morse - don’t think so. I think he’s saying institutioins (IT Services) should adopt a risk approach and advise othgers based on this.
2:53 [Comment From john morse (online)]
so more advise than control…

and as you said (the last words on the chat):

2:53 [Comment From Paul Walk]
The risk is to the institution. Users don’t generally care about this. It doesn’t mean that there are, nonetheless, risks to institutions

I can’t see any evidence to support your view that “Interestingly, the ‘back-channel’ at the symposium, populated primarily perhaps by people likely to be passionate about new technology, tended to dismiss some of Chris’s points. I felt that some participants either didn’t realise, or didn’t care that Chris was describing risks to the institution.”

Maybe that’s what you expected from the participants, but the evidence seems to suggest they were seeking clarification, and accepted that Chris was raising legitimate issues.