TLT Symposium and my Secret Government Chat Room

Long week but got a wide assortment of brain food to digest. At the risk of sounding too butt-kissing, the TLT Symposium on March 29 was THE most impressive symposium/conference/convention/etc I've been to, particularly in terms of quality and coolness. Now in the interest of full disclosure I haven't been to many other academic gatherings (and have thus missed out on a quintessential perk of academia) but the rest felt like "excuses for similar experts to travel and eat". This one had a clear, actual purpose of helping people understand things, and that usefulness probably helped trickle into the web setups, tagging, paraphernalia and conversation.In other words coming from an engineering arena to an education arena, I felt like there was much more outright teaching of new concepts than just necessary explaining. This feeling was magnified when I drove the next day to the Baltimore-DC corridor for a robot engineering meeting. Although the presentations (including mine) seemed to come across very well, 90% of effort was spent just getting a basic understanding across. Like we were all on different expertise mountains, taking days to slowly connect a string between us so we can tie it to soup cans and get communicating. This happens in many subjects and in pre-college subjects, but I've never been on levels that are so high up and far apart.Blah blah blah, why is he talking about this? Well, the hosts of the robot meeting actually tried to use a social-style  software program to help alleviate these formal communication barriers, talking real-time instead of through alternating PowerPoints. I'm sure the details of it are highly classified but after using other tools (blogs, chatting, twitter, wikis) you know the general strategy. Even in a government setting with people who were unfamiliar to social software, it worked quickly and helped tremendously. It also showed those same Web 2.0 novices exhibit some of the same online behavior (and there very well might have been outright "trolling" or "sock puppetry") so these behaviors aren't from long-term exposure to the environment. Social electronic conversations to develop in telltale ways despite the subject or its importance, despite the people or their experience, even despite the environment around them.Are all CoPs equally ready for something like Twitter?Luckily I wasn't very important or useful at the meeting, so I could spend all day focusing on this stuff.