Twitter dispatching "at" the RNC

Nancy Scola, who wrote yesterday about mobile media coordination of protests at RNC2008, has a follow-up interview with one fellow who acted as a dispatcher. The RNC took place in Minneapolis-St.Paul; the "dispatcher" worked from Tempe and had never been to the Twin Cities. Among the things he did: "appending the hash tag #RNC08 to untagged protest-related tweets so that they would pop-up on the C-SPAN RNC ’08 Convention Hub."

ATTW 2009 call for papers is out

And it looks really interesting.

ATTW 2009 : : Beyond Work? Technical Communication in Professional,
Community, & Social Networks

12th Annual ATTW Conference
March 11th, 2009
San Francisco, CA

Traditionally, teachers and researchers of technical writing have concentrated on writing in workplace settings. And rightly so. But the spread of information technology into all areas of social life means that, increasingly, technical communication practices and genres arise and collide in social spheres other than the workplace. Combine this trend with an increasingly mobile work environment in which people are working from home or from the neighborhood coffee shop rather than an office or shop floor, and an increasingly global workforce that spans multiple time zones, and you have the basis for dramatic shifts in the contexts, practices, genres, and purposes of technical writing. Some may see a threat to our identity, while others may see opportunities for work to have broader cultural and economic relevance.

More at the link.

Mobile technologies enable networked protests at RNC convention

Some notes from the field, courtesy Nancy Scola of TechPresident. Many more possibilities have opened for spontaneous organization since the Seattle WTF protests in 1997 were coordinated by mobile phones.