CNU Transportation Summit: Reflections on communication

As the CNU Transportation Summit winds down on its last day, I’d like to go over some thoughts I’ve been having about how communications were employed throughout the event. My focus will be heavy on how new media was employed, both good and bad, throughout the conference.

First off, lets start with the trendiest of all social media tools, Twitter. Some attendees were using the system, tapping away at their laptops in the front row. It was kind of cool to load the #CNUtrans hash tag and see what people were saying. Yet how functional was it really? Most posts were just repeating what was occurring in the room, and while that might be useful to someone not in attendance, it wasn’t very useful to those that were here.

There were a number of bloggers present, including people from Reconnecting America and Streetsblog, along with Portland’s own Chris Smith. Few were live blogging, however, and the coverage on the net has been rather scarce.

Imagine if, instead, people had been using Twitter to share reactions and discuss topics as they were spoken about. Imagine if one of the conference staff were constantly on a laptop available by Twitter to answer questions and concerns about the day even as the conference moved on. There would be no need to pause for housekeeping issues.

I did notice someone was video recording a few segments, but why not webcast the conference? Why not at a minimum record the presentations and make them available on YouTube? Likewise, why not make an audio recording of some of them, and podcast the entire event?

To the credit of the conference, some presentations were being made available on the CNU’s webpage for the summit via Slideshare. (The organizers are attempting to get all of the presentations online, but some of the presenters have not yet gotten copies to the CNU.) This was smart, but it could have gone further. I would assume that all the presentations were in hand the day before the conference if not earlier — why aren’t they all online by the morning of their presentation?

(Of course, I’m in the middle of assisting a workshop in December and this critique will no doubt come back to bite me in the posterior.)

The point of this is not to throw rocks at the CNU Transportation Summit. The event was very well organized and effective. The issue, however, is that communication was emerging as a key component of transportation reform. Multiple presenters mentioned how important it will be to educate the public about why the current system is financially and culturally unsustainable, and why the CNU’s proposals are a worthy tool to employ in moving forward. This is, after all, a change management problem, as IBM’s Stan Curtis pointed out yesterday. In such situations, communication will be key.

Making the conference available as much as possible would have been a very powerful tool for helping to advance the Congress’ communications goals. Instead of thinking about a deliberative process and a communicative process as different, the web allows and even encourages the possibility of combining the two, and in the process increasing transparency at the same time. This is a possibility that should be harnessed whenever possible.