As the keen followers of this blog will know, we like to organise (and attend) the odd event or two here at FutureGov. From FutureGov Network meet ups, to Gov2Gov events, to online film premieres, to lending a hand at bigger events like Gov20 Camp, Reboot Britain and Social Innovation Camp, we love getting out and about listening, learning and sharing.

At all of these events and more besides, there has been a rapid growth in real time reporting on the goings on during the sessions due in no small part to the explosive adoption of tools like Twitter, particularly at events in London “Twitter capital of the world“. Through the use of hashtags and sites such as Twitterfall (a personal fave of mine), it is now possible to bring together the collective intelligence and voices of a room (in fact world) into discussions once dominated by panelists from the front or loudest voices from the back. Some of the more forward thinking event organisers such as the RSA (who FutureGov are currently working with on their digital engagement strategy but who had picked up on this long before we arrived) are now placing live digital engagement (and Twitter in particular) at the heart of their events, recognising the importance of real time reporting and feedback to a vibrant and inclusive event.

Obviously there is more to life than just Twitter (yes you did here me right). The wider discipline of social reporting has become a boom industry, due in no small part to David Wilcox and others, drawing on a wide range of live and near live reporting tools to share the experience of an event with those not able to make it along themselves. These range from:

• Video: both live and recorded (sometimes both if you’re lucky!), for instance the streaming from Reboot Britain and launch of Us Now to web now online. Or even the use of tools like VideoBoo to capture video snippets Twitter style, such as when Enabled by Design headed off to the Naidex exhibition to capture opinion on assistive equipment.
• Podcast: audio interviews and recordings of events shared back online, such as following the recent Gov2Gov event at Canada House or used on a regular basis by the RSA and others.
• Photos: very much the must have whether live via Twitpic or aggregated on sites such as Flickr after the event.
• Slideshows: this is all about slideshare, providing a quick and easy way to load and embed presentations and documents
• Documents: a range of sites (from Scribd to Edocr) to help event organisers share documents in a more interactive way than purely the usual downloadable PDF format
• Blogs: often used for longer prose but also to bring together a range of media such as photos, videos and slides from presentations, for instance reporting back on our first Local Government Breakfast Club back in February
• Search aggregation: Addictomatic, Pageflakes, Netvibes and others to bring together a range of related content through the use of search and rss, similar to how David Osimo used it following the EU Public Services 2.0 event

But what happens to all the great content generated by event organisers or people attending these events, now mostly shared over Twitter (Twitter increasingly taking centre stage as the number one events convener online)? Where do all those Tweets go? Hashtags die (just search #fgl2l on Twitter from our ‘Learning to Listen‘ event we held in June if you don’t believe me) and URLs get lost in the noise of the day.

Well now comes the Twitter book (see below). Developed by Andrew Krzmarzick, who I first met at Gov20 Camp last March and have kept in touch with since (yes, mostly over Twitter), the Twitter book tries to answer the perennial post-event question “that was nice, now what?”. Published for the first time just last week on GovLoop in partnership with the 1105 Group following the Open Government and Innovations Conference, it brings together 4,423 tweets (150+ pages of data) from 629 contributors at 35 conference sessions. Drawing on 8 volunteers over 5 days, Andy and the team have managed to synthesise a mind blowing amount of opinions, facts and links into a not insignificant yet readable 62 pages.

While some may see this as the web one-ing of a web two tool, it makes a great step in the right direction in terms of capturing useful content and presenting it in a way that is familiar, useful and user friendly to a far wider audience (govweb geeks included). It also goes to show how you currently can’t beat human powered search (or editing as it used to be know) as well as the importance of reaching out and meeting an audience on its own terms and through the lowest barrier to entry.

Others have already started to successfully bring together all these tools at our disposal. FutureGov competition winner Liz Azyan’s report back from the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 is probably the best example I’ve seen so far, although again this relies on a degree of web access and, frankly, willingness from the reader to engage with this format.

So where next? What are your favourite hints and tips in terms of capturing and reporting back either in real time or after the event? Where do you see things going? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Open Government and Innovations Conference “TweetBook”