Monday was very much a getting-ready kind of day, with a fairly relaxed (if Disney-fied) breakfast in the hotel restaurant, a planning meeting with some of the local Salvation Army team and an opportunity to check out the technical facilities. Mercifully, the internet connection was adequate for my purposes.

Colleagues in The Salvation Army’s USA Southern communications team invited my boss and I out for dinner… at an English fish-and-chips shop nearby. Staffed by a Scot and a Geordie, it did a very good impression of being back home – with proper chips, real tea and Only Fools and Horses on the TV.

On Tuesday, the ‘Global Conversation’ got underway properly, with delegates arriving from all over the world. The opening meeting was well attended, and was followed by me briefing the 24 delegates who had been selected to record the conversations in their groups. I then needed to create user accounts for them all, and email ‘invitations’ to the live text facility for the appropriate seminar, etc.

A formal dinner rounded off the day, which was considerably posher than the previous night’s chipfest. Suit and tie was the order of the day, as various Salvation Army luminaries spoke.

Wednesday and Thursday were exceptionally busy, with three consecutive seminar streams to provide live text streams for twice a day. As well as the scripted text, downloadable papers and contributions from the 24 ‘facilitators’, the events were open to salvationarmy.org visitors to comment on. This meant a lot of rapid decision-making, and collating appropriate remarks from Twitter, Facebook and the micro-site I’d set up for the conference. EventStudio did us proud, and we had interaction from more than double the number of delegates that were physically at the event in person.

 

Cobbling all this together for Friday’s plenary session (in the presence of Salvation Army top bod, General Andre Cox, no less) was no mean feat. Both Wednesday and Thursday nights were very late ones, as I edited together the most illuminating comments from around the tables and around the internet.

The Friday morning sum-up was an almost entirely unscripted meeting, which I provided live text commentary for. Fairly hair-raising… but well-received.