I’m @spartacus

A week in Twitter. (For an explanation of terms see foot)
One of the reasons I was looking forward to Unison conference was the chance to meet my fellow twitterer @debauchery. Before we arrived we had decided to enliven the conference with some real time, live tweeting. To coordinate this wee needed a hashtag, and because at our preceding Local Government Conference they had used the tag #lg09 I started using the tag #ndc09 (National Delegate Conference). Soo for the couple of days leading up I merrily contributed to #ndc09 with tweets. Pretty mundane stuff, but I got a few replies and was even retweeted with my comment about buying a netbook so I could tweet from the conference seats. I even looked at some posted photos  of the conference being prepared. It all looked very exciting.

Hmmmm, though... something didn’t seem right. The more I looked at #ndc09 the more Less it looked like I expected. All the contributors were men, and although I thought stuff like twitter may be more populated by men than women I expected a few more women than absolutely none at all. Hmmmmm again, I though…where were the tweets talking about arcane detail of Unison rule changes ? Where were those tweets sniping at the union’s leadership ? Where were the tweets talking about the best drinking holes in Brighton ?

and most of all why were so many tweets referring to hardcore computer geekery ? Hmmmmm again again .... a penny dropped, albeit slowly through the treacle of my thoughts. A bit of digging further, I found the root of my Hmmmmmms. #ndc09 apparently stands for the Norwegian Developers Conference taking place in Oslo, the same week as our conference. I really do put the Twit in Twitter (better than putting the Fake in Facebook)
I decided though, that I would continue to follow the Norwegian Developers Conference. After all I had no clue how to develop a Norwegian and I had always wanted one of my own. Must admit during the week they did appear to be having a livelier time than us and I did continue to update them with our progress (always spread the union word), and have now tweeted comradely solidarity to our Norse comrades from Unison in Brighton. (Turned out NDC was a Microsoft thing)

Soooo we needed a new hashtag, a bigger hashtag, so after flirting with other options I suggested the snappy and innovative title #undc09 (U being for Unison). We were all set, we merry band of followers. It really added a dimension to our conference to have opinion from all corners of the hall. There was also some interesting debate which mainly involved me against everyone else. Wasn’t it ever thus. . . This was to my knowledge the first trade union conference that had a real time twitter feed. Indeed we were tagged by a HR Blogging site pointing its readers in our direction. I reckon all considered our conference tweeting experiment was a success, but watch out next year, with more participants and better publicity it could really take off and become a valuable mainstream resource for debate and connection to a wider membership. The best thing of course was to meet @debaucherydean. It just shows those who dismiss social networking, that virtual friends can become real friends.

A much more important aspect of Twitter came to the fore later in the week. Twitter found itself as the predominate method to get news out of the Iranian protest movement and the violent crackdown by the forces of their illegitimate government. The Iranian secret police had been successful in squashing nearly all other news outlets and the broadcast media were being restricted in its efforts. Twitter though was still working. Hashtags such as #iranelection became a constant feed of news, views, pictures and videos from the streets of Tehran. As a twitter community many of us changed our avatars to a green version to show some solidarity. Then the tweets came through suggesting that we change our listed profile locations to Tehran to help disguise the real Iranian twitterers. Effectively we all shout “I’m Iranian”. I’ve no idea if it really made any difference, but if it did hamper the ability of Iran to block individual twitterers then it was certainly worth it.
Saturday night was an extraordinarily harrowing and humbling experience. I followed the events though the hashtag and regular ReTweets from @debaucherydean who did a great job filtering out some of the noise, and at one stage organised a phone campaign to the Foreign Office to ensure their Tehran embassy was open to the injured. At one point a video was posted showing the aftermath from the shooting of a young woman. She was being carried by a group of protesters and they laid her on the road as her father ran over. At first you could see no sign of a wound. As she lay their her eyes glazed and then blood started to seep out all over her face, from her eyes, from her nose, from her mouth… and then she died. It was the most stark and upsetting video I have ever seen and to know It had happened just moments earlier made it all the more real. This video brought home the plight of the Iranian protesters, with heavy heavy thud. We later found out that her name was Neda. Her face with live with me for a long time. I’m not sure whether to post the link to the video. If anyone wishes to see it then I guess you can track it down.
Other tweets that night were for information between protesters. Advice was given as to how to be protected from chemical attack. Information was posted as to which foreign embassies were taking in the injured. We also say great compassion from the protesters. One picture showing a fallen riot police motorcyclist being shielded by a protester was particularly humbling (see above).
A Twitter week from the mundane to the vital.








Twitter Terms Explained :
Tweet = a short message under 140 characters, can contain links to pictures or videos
@username = your twitterer username
Followers = the people / feeds that you follow and follow you
RT or ReTweet = a tweet passed on
Hashtag or #something = a webpage automatically created to elicit shared real time contributions on a topic