Readers of this blog might be interested to hear that I presented a keynote drawing on our Twitter research at the Conference on e-Democracy (CeDEM) in Krems, Austria, yesterday: highlighting what we might be able to learn from the use of Twitter in acute events like the Queensland floods and the WikiLeaks controversy for more general e-democracy initiatives.

Acute events, after all, provide an important opportunity to rapidly develop social media solutions for the current crisis, unencumbered by the administrative hurdles which may otherwise be in place. During such events, there’s a need to just make do with whatever tools are available, rather than to develop complex and costly customised solutions; for all the wrong reasons, perhaps, but very effectively nonetheless, they foster rapid prototyping mechanisms. And what’s developed here may remain thoroughly applicable outside of these crisis situations, too.

That’s the overall approach I took in my keynote, anyway. The slides and full paper (with audio from the talk to come soon) are available on my own blog, along with full liveblogging coverage of the CeDEM conference. I’d especially recommend the preceding keynote by Catherine Haythornthwaite, which linked very well with my own. My thanks to the CeDEM organisers – another very enjoyable conference in a great venue!