Once I talked my company into becoming a sponsor ford.construct06 the next big question was what gem we would give to the delegates. I have been given so much stuff at conferences; pens, books and lots of bags. The only thing of true use being a plastic plectrum from SWSX. It is a great substitute for a stress ball. I really don’t need another branded bag.

After a discussion with Jeremy Keith at the Clearleft office warming party, I was encouraged to run with the idea of building an online space for delegates. No branded bags this time. Why not build a place for delegates to network and share information.

http://dconstruct06.madgex.com/

The recent events I have attended have been surrounded with delegate generated content. People often blog about which event they are attending to help increase the social perspective and to arrange specific meetings with other delegates who share the same interest. Blogging is also used to share notes and reviews from the session. Conference wifi often dies under the strain of Flickr uploads. Then there’s the backchannels, those semi-secretive groups of people chatting over IRC. Sharing these activities and the rich resources they provide now forms an invaluable part of my conference experience.

Backnetwork is an attempt at building an online community around an event. Central to this is a simple social networking area where everyone has a profile and is able to define their relationships to each other. Around this central area we have tried to pull together blog entries, photos and chat into one resource. The idea was to bring a focus to the wealth of interaction and resources generated by delegates as a common resource for everyone.

The site was designed from the ground to allow anyone to make use of the data it collects. We have tried to actively encourage everyone to reuse the data by adding extensive Microformat copies and paste code and RSS feeds where ever we could.

I would have liked to have added both a JSON and XML-RPC API but was restrained by what I could fit into eight weekends. In fact there are a number of great additional features that could be added, hopefully we can implement one or two more before the conference.

I hope you enjoy using backnetwork, see you at the event.