Simon Willison’s Weblog

Chat rooms and meetings

11th January 2003

In-Room Chat as a Social Tool: Clay Shirky describes an experiment with an online chat room set up to accompany a meeting of 30 people taking place in the same room. The chat room (available to attendees via Wifi laptops and displayed on a big screen at the front of the room) had some interesting effects on the dynamics of the meeting, not least of which was the dramatic impact the chat room had on the “interrupt logic” of the proceedings.