Escaping the Echo Chamber with SLA Europe

Last night, Ned Potter (aka thewikiman) and I did a presentation for SLA Europe at the City Business Library on the Echo Chamber, alongside Bethan Ruddock and Jo Anderson talking about Voices for the Library. It was a roaring success – despite some initial difficulties! Poor Ned was stuck in traffic for most of the day, so unfortunately missed the start of the presentation. Bethan and Jo very kindly agreed to do a bit of rearranging so they could go on first, to give Ned a bit more time to get to the venue – cheers guys! I did do the start of mine and Ned’s joint talk alone (hopefully I did Ned’s contributions justice!), but luckily I was only about 10 minutes in to our talk when he arrived and we managed to carry on the talk pretty seamlessly, I think 🙂

Here’s the Prezi:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Escaping the echo-chamber by Wiki Chaos on Prezi, posted with vodpod

The whole evening was recorded, and will be available on the SLA Europe website as a podcast shortly.

On a personal note, I had a great time last night. I must admit I was absolutely petrified at the thought of carrying the whole presentation by myself, so was very relieved when Ned came striding in like a big damn hero – seriously, I have never been so happy to see someone in my entire life! On the other hand, at least now I know that that’s a situation I am capable of dealing with, if need be. It was scary, but I think I coped ok with delivering a part of the presentation for which I had no notes and no preparation time!

The networking session afterwards was also fantastic – despite some slightly rough wine at the bar we decamped to once we’d left the CBL, which has left me feeling a bit poorly this morning 😦 It was great to meet so many Twitterers in real life: I can now confirm that @ggNewEd, @laurajwilkinson, @anniemauger, and @philbradley (among others) are in fact real people, not just Twitter avatars 🙂

Thank you so much to Geraldine and all others at SLA Europe who worked so hard to organise last night; to the City Business Library for allowing us to use their space (and especially to the two staff members on duty last night, who were absolute troopers despite both having lost their voices!); to Beth and Jo for their insightful presentation on Voices for the Library, to Ned for battling through horrendous traffic (with wife and baby in tow) to get there last night; and of course to everyone who came along and made it such an enjoyable evening. Looking forward to the next time!

Postscript: We also have a shorter version of the Prezi, which we put together in PowerPoint, if anyone’s interested in seeing a condensed version: