 Hi, everyone. If you want to grab your seats, I just want to welcome you, settle this rowdy bunch here, and welcome you to the New America Foundation. New America Foundation is working in partnership with the British Council and through, actually, Kara right here, who is a veteran from New America, who's now moved on to bigger and better things. But we are working with them to sort of bring, I think, sort of a couple of conversations, I hope, of which this is the first, on topics of interest and of import to our daily lives. And I'm Sasha Meinrath. I direct the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, which is sort of the tech and telecom arm of the Foundation's work. It also does everything from foreign policy analysis to health care reform and education reform work. And today, I think we're going to sort of interrogate and look at some of the notions around this idea of trust. I think most of what we hear is sort of the dystopian future, right, this notion of fishing and man in the middle attacks and identity theft and hackers and predators and all of these things that are meant to instill fear. Because this fear mongering actually sells a lot of papers and gets a lot of eyeballs on a lot of websites. And some of these fears are perhaps well deserved. But I think tonight, we're actually going to invite an illustrious panel of experts to kind of punch through what I see as a lot of the hype around these new technologies. And I hope we'll also be discussing perhaps some of the more democratic and participatory potentials to computer-mediated communications at large and how trust itself is really a key component of that. So I would argue that connectivity is sort of this force multiplier. It's not a neutral medium, as some people say. But rather, it amplifies both the good, the bad, and perhaps the ugly that might otherwise exist. But on this perfect fall evening, and I'm very happy that we'll be getting out after this to catch a pint, as all Uprits say. But we've chosen a more optimistic framework, something where we actually look at sort of discussing what I see as a fundamental tenant to 21st century civil society, which is the trust that must be imbued in the systems, the communications, and what have you that we use every day to communicate and to build next generation communities. So with that, I'm going to actually turn it over, I think, to Rebecca, who is going to give a large-scale introduction. And then we'll have a discussion amongst this panel. And then eventually we'll open it up for Q&A from all of you. So welcome and thank you for coming out this evening. All right, I'm trying out my new and exciting iPad this evening, so you'll have to bear with me. But first and foremost, thank you all for attending. My name is Rebecca Zilberman. I manage networks and partnerships here at the British Council in Washington, DC. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the British Council, we are the UK's International Cultural Relations Organization. We operate in over 100 countries worldwide. And we build trust and create opportunity through our work in the arts, English language, and education and society. And as Sasha mentioned, we're here at the New America Foundation during Digital Capital Week to talk about trust and how the widespread adoption of new mediums of communication may or may not change the way that we build it. I'm sure most, if not all of you, use social media in your daily lives. But how many of you have found it a useful tool to build relationships? Do you think you can use digital technology alone to engage with new audiences? Or are face-to-face encounters necessary? I have my own thoughts about these questions, and you may as well, after all, you're here tonight for the discussion. But first, a bit why I am kicking things off, I manage the Transatlantic Network 2020 project, which is a project designed to reinvigorate the transatlantic relationship by connecting the next generation of influencers across borders. These are young professionals from a variety of sectors who have already exhibited tremendous potential in their careers. Our role is to identify them, bring them together, and then allow them to benefit from the network effect to go out and build on what they've already achieved. In essence, the project is about building a long-term international engagement among individuals, providing members of the network an opportunity to interact not only with each other, but with new ideas both through in-person encounters and online engagement. A few of them are here tonight, and one, Stephanie Schirholz, is one of our panelists. I encourage you to meet them. As this network, while small in number, is designed to engage far beyond its membership, which, again, is in part why we've convened tonight's discussion. Finally, I'd like to thank the New America Foundation for being our gracious host this evening, and for DC Week, as well as Futuregov, presenting this event in partnership with us. Before we kick off a bit of housekeeping, we want to keep the engagement happening both in-person and online during the discussion, so we've created a hashtag that's hash DC 2020. And then, of course, after tonight's discussion, we're going to head over around the corner for some face-to-face engagement at Science Club, where we'll have some food as well as drinks available. So without further ado, please welcome my colleague, Kara Haj, who's head of digital media here at British Council. Thank you all for coming. Welcome. We're glad to have you here tonight. We're going to talk for about half an hour, and then we'll open things up for more informal questions. As Rebecca mentioned, we're using the hashtag DC 2020, and for those of you who haven't noticed the camera when you came in, this is being live-streamed. Everything is on the record, and our online audience can use that hashtag to submit questions during the Q&A. We have a stellar panel here tonight. I promise to avoid the space metaphors, even though one of them is from NASA. We'll see how that goes. But let me introduce you to them so we can get started. Deborah Dignum is digital advisor for the arts at the British Council, and she develops digital platforms that expand upon our work in the performing arts. Deborah is also on the digital advisory committee of the Royal Shakespeare Company and a guest lecturer at Goldsmiths. Danny Harris is editor of People's District, which is a local website that shares the stories and photos of the district's diverse residents. Danny also manages advocacy and marketing campaigns of using digital media for a variety of organizations around the city. And hopefully he'll talk about some of those as well as People's District tonight. And Stephanie Schierholz, in addition to being a TN 2020 member, is social media manager at NASA, where among her many hats, she manages NASA's 250 Twitter accounts, the main one of which has itself nearly 1.6 million followers. Stephanie, that's a lot of followers. It is. How do you engage with them and what's NASA's approach to social media like in general? Well, the important thing is to start small, but then to see everybody as an individual, right? So you can't see them as this mass of 1.6 million followers. You have to look at them as individual followers. And what sort of underlies the way that NASA got involved with social media was this mandate that the agency has, which was part of the 1958 act that established NASA, if you're unfamiliar with it, mandated that we communicate what we're doing as widely as possible. We obviously are funded by taxpayers. So it behooves us to tell the taxpayers what's happening with their money and what's going on with the nation's space program and space exploration. So we've always been involved in getting the word out. During the Apollo program, you could watch the live video feed from the moon, right? So the web was obviously the next step for us in that, but the web requires people to come to us and social media allows us to show up in people's other streams in what they're doing. So that was the idea with social media, was to find another way to reach out to people to tell them what they're doing. And we just started small. We didn't really know what we were doing. We experimented, and Twitter was the first place that we really did that with social media. Now we have all these accounts, as you mentioned, nasa.gov slash connect is where you can find them all if you want. But we really put a big focus on engaging with people and on answering their questions so that if you tweeted at us at nasa, you had a reasonable expectation of getting a response if it was a real question. And what kind of people do you tweet at you? Are they all space enthusiasts? No, we see a wide range of people. I mean, obviously you're a space enthusiast to an extent if you're asking questions at nasa. But I would say by and large, we get a lot of followers who are interested enough that the idea of following nasa is appealing, but not necessarily die-hards. Now, don't get me wrong, we have die-hards. We have groupies, and that's a whole different sort of part of the audience, and you have to talk to them a little bit differently than you do to just the generalist. But we answer a diversity of questions ranging from super technical type questions to basic questions like, are we still going to the moon? The answer's no. Great. So you've talked about getting the word out for nasa and really trying to get these stories out about the work they're doing. Danny, you've also talked about trying to get the word out, but on a smaller scale, still to a large audience, could you tell us a little bit about where the People's District came from and why you chose the medium that you did to get People's Personal Stories out there? Sure. So I moved to the city about six years ago originally to work in Terrace Finance at the Treasury Department. And I lived here and I sort of went through the motions of the bureaucratic life and was happily working as a civil servant. But I felt these sort of breaks in the city because I felt like in talking to people about the district, they would describe the city that was segregated in so many different ways. It was black versus white. It was northwest versus everybody else. It was federal versus local, punk versus go-go. I mean, you name it, there are divisions in the city. And one day I actually was in Whole Foods and I had a panic attack. I was surrounded by all these people who were identical to me. We grew up in the same neighborhoods. We were shopping for the same quinoa. We were working in the same kind of jobs and yet we not only did we not talk to each other but we didn't acknowledge each other. And so that evening I made a decision that the way I was gonna resolve this, my urban therapy was that I was gonna go interview a stranger every day. I wanted to go and learn about the city but ultimately to learn about these people who I saw more often than my family who lives in New York. And so it started this process two years ago where I've now interviewed over 700 people and most of them and their stories live on my website peoplesdistrict.com. But the idea behind it was twofold. One was I started to see that these stories represented a DC that I never understood when I first moved here. It wasn't all about the federal city and it wasn't about the mall but it was about these rich textures, these human stories. But the other was about interaction. So how could you get these stories to encourage people to meet their neighbors and to realize this wonderful richness that I was experiencing from meeting people with the hope that building this online platform it can encourage people to do the same. Would you say that creating a platform gave you an excuse to go up to people in real life? I think so. I've always been a relatively social person but I think when I started, there was always this fear that I had that people would say, well, who are you and what are you gonna do with these things? And that did happen. But most of the time if you go and ask somebody who drives a bus or who collects garbage tell me about that moment that moment that you decided you wanted to be a garbage collector or tell me what do you understand about the city by collecting its garbage? I mean, how many trash collectors do you think are regularly asked these questions? And when I started to realize was that there was this wonderful value in doing it both for me and understanding all these amazing stories but also in collecting these incredible narratives and I'm a big fan of Studs Turkle who many of you know is the premier oral historian and his ability of capturing these stories of everyday people and making them so fascinating but also making it so that when you read the story you wanted to go out and find your own trash collector to get your own story or to understand the story of your mailman. So everybody has different stories and not everybody said yes but it's been incredibly positive since doing it. And like you said, it's underscored different aspects of human experience that everyone can relate to. I think Debra, you've done some of that in your work but maybe crossing broader geographical and cultural divides. One interesting project that you've worked on is Gulf Stage. Could you tell us a bit how that crossed geographical boundaries and really brought together different cultures? So Gulf Stage was a project that happened in October 2010. It happened in Qatar in the Middle East and essentially the project was about working with ministries of culture in that region and they're very interested in how they might sort of innovate in terms of theater and how they might find an interesting way to bring theater more so into the mindset of the young people and the young generation. And so we worked with them with our partners in the UK with a company called Digital Theater and what we did was to find a way to capture the theater of those different countries of the participating festival which was the Gulf Youth Theater participating festival. What was really interesting was that actually for the countries, six countries including Bahrain, UAE, Saudi Arabia, they'd never before experienced something like this and the intention was that we would capture their live productions, their theatrical productions, translate them all into English and then make them all readily available on a website completely free to view and still there. What was really interesting for the participating countries and also for the ministries of culture was that for once they had a way to actually preserve their cultural heritage and I think just when we think about technology or the digital space, we tend to think of YouTube and think about viral hits and millions of people watching very fast produced content very quickly but actually thinking about the digital space and thinking about the future and how you might preserve that is also quite interesting. So those productions are now still available and we worked quite hard to try and build a sense of community and as you say to kind of transfer the trust we built in the Middle East in working with the theater makers, working with the young participants and also in the UK with theater makers there as well and sort of one really interesting way that we tried to sort of broker that when we launched was that we launched through Twitter but we linked up with the Foreign Office, the FCO, operational in the Middle East with the British Council, extensive global networks and also with young practitioners in the UK and also with our own social media strategists working in the Middle East who also worked for Al Jazeera as well so it was a very interesting way to try and see how you could bring that very authentic unique content and how you can share and foster dialogue around that then as well. So essentially you networked the network to get out to all these people with these plays. When people were responding to the performances what kinds of audience did you realize that you reached? Were they new audiences to theater? Were they already interested in theater and coming across a new culture for the first time or both? A really, really cross-sectoral audience. What was interesting was that the audience first began actually in the Middle East for people who wouldn't normally go to theater. Theater is still a very young art form in many countries there and they suddenly, by framing the work in that way, by seeing it captured, by understanding that it would be available to view they suddenly became an audience for their own theater which is very interesting and then also the general audience in that country but we also had people who we launched on the first day we had people watching in Japan, people watching in the United States, in Australia, all over the world and the comments across Twitter and across social media in many different platforms were incredibly interesting and it was a constant flow of English and a flow of Arabic as well and sometimes they intersected but it was really exciting to see sort of when you finally launched that out there how the response was so diverse and can suddenly capture imagination in so many different ways across countries. That's great. One thing that struck me is that Stephanie you also mentioned going to where people already are Deborah you talked about putting it in a context that's more familiar online versus in a theater but even if you are meeting people where they're already spending their time online there's so much content online and people increasingly have the ability to focus in on just what interests them or focus in on things they already agree with. How do you deal with that challenge and what are the benefits of reaching new audiences when you do? Stephanie maybe in terms of NASA? That's a really good question and it is to remain relevant within somebody's stream is a challenge. Luckily at NASA we are blessed with very good content. Content is the biggest problem for most people who are entering the social space is how do you determine what you have that's valuable and shareable and create a niche for yourself where you are a subject matter expert or you have something unique. Well, we have the universe and we have great pictures and video and our pictures are our most clicked on content. It's the most retweeted shared thing. So if you like us on Facebook you will get our image of the day every day in your new stream. It gets automatically populated and then if you share it in your new stream somebody else clicks on it. If they aren't already liking NASA they'll be taken to a page to like NASA to get the image of the day in their stream. Now the balance especially with Facebook is you don't wanna be in there too much because you don't want them to hide you. But with 1.6 million followers you also have the benefit of we're gaining about 5,000 followers a day. So if I post something multiple times on Twitter there's always a new audience who hasn't seen it yet. Great, so it's like normal social norms. If you go and meet someone and talk their ear off they'll be less interested than if you always have something interesting to say. Right, well and we were talking about this yesterday at lunch the balance of not over hyping. So when you're talking about trust you don't wanna be the person who cries will fund social media who says this is the best picture ever. Because if you do that every day they're gonna quit clicking because they're gonna say okay yeah I'm over that. You said that yesterday and it was a lame picture so why am I gonna click on it today? You have to have the balance of getting it interesting enough headline that they click on it but not so much that you're overselling what you're sharing with them. Great, and Dianne this seems to apply to everything you've said too in that you're trying to bring stories to people who wouldn't meet the people you're profiling to begin with. Do you feel that you've connected with a new audience and how did you build a following in the beginning? Well I realize it's a strange proposition to start a website about people that encourages people to not read websites and go meet people. So with that understanding I can view it in a few ways. One being that there's so many different ways of accessing the hyper local world online. You can read blogs and I think actually what's more interesting than blogs is the comments and the blogs that really provide the insight that is sort of the online version of the neighbor on the porch. But what I see where the stories fit in is that they're narratives. So if you've never been to Barry Farms then maybe you know that your Metro will eventually take you there if you got off the green line if you stayed on the green line and you ended up at Anacostia and you just walked over maybe you'd recognize the story of the mother talking about her son the differences that you just have different tools or different language to describe it. So I think that they're human stories and that's what people connect to. So the ability of drawing people in I know obviously I used all the tools and I emailed everybody I knew and I told them to email everybody that they knew and then I started to get cross posting but what I started to see was that people connected with the stories because they knew the people. They said hey every time I go to the 930 Club there's this big guy with a lot of tattoos who always checks my ID and I've always wondered what his story was and most people don't ask. So when that story is online not only are you reading it but you're sharing it with all your friends who were there with you that night and they say hey that's Josh and this is why he has all these tattoos and next time we're there maybe we can raise some of these things even if it benefits us so we can get to the front of the line. Whatever reason it is but it's these people these local personalities who are I used to think there were extras in our lives but in DC I see again my bus driver four times a week that's not an extra he's like a supporting cast. So again to add these texture to people there's this wonderful value and I think that's partly what it is and then when you move outside of DC it's this notion that they're these communities so if you're a bike messenger or if you're a baker or if you're interested in playing street ball these communities are not limited to just Washington. So when I told the story about Mark the bike messenger who complained not about email but about fax machines and what it meant to bike messengers when fax machines first came out that story went to Hungary and it went to Prague and it went to Kazakhstan and it went to places where there are bike messengers and they talk and they feel like are people and so that's part of this idea around people's history. And how do you get a feel for the feedback that people have is it mostly through comments on the blog or through social media? It's interesting again that basic sort of challenge that I faced about online versus offline. There was one story that I posted a girl named Erica who's a junior at HD Woodson Senior High School and she told the story about how difficult it was to be a student a black student in an all black school who doesn't interact with anybody who's white except for an occasional teacher and how she wanted to be a journalist so she could talk about issues of diversity in school and how this impacts her life. This was her story. And so I cross posted it and overall there were about 200 comments most of the comments focused on oh the state of the public schools or oh you should be a journalist but you should really work on your grammar but then there was one there was that one person who emailed so all these 146 comments there was one email who said I would like to tutor Erica. Give me her name. She expresses these challenges I would like to do something about her. So for 146 there's one I mean my goal in doing this is that there are 146 people who email me or email Erica directly and say I want to help you in some capacity I don't expect everybody to go out and tutor somebody or to go meet their neighbors but the idea that everybody seems a little bit more human and when somebody talks about a challenge in their community or issues of gentrification which is the other big one in DC is you don't start commenting about this and that but you may go ask your neighbor and say tell me what the neighborhood used to be like or tell me a story about the street or tell me what it means to live in this neighborhood. It's not again it's not this notion that we all have this huge responsibility but again it's trying to change it so that you're not commenting but you're doing. That's great and essentially you make new connections in the process among people. I think Debra a lot of the work that the British Council engages in has to do with forging those new connections between people and a couple of the projects you've told me about have done that in new and different ways. How have you reached new audiences for professionals working in the performing arts and not just new audiences for viewing the work? Well I think new audiences is a term in the arts that we use all the time and it's what's an audience? What's a new audience? What's an old audience? Which is a really good question to ask and I think particularly in the digital space people are very obsessed by the idea of developing these new audiences as if there are millions of people out there just ready and waiting to sort of to come and view what you have but I think actually by cultivating a digital audience as being a new audience it's just a new way of communicating with that audience but if you want to actually as we do sometimes it's to try and less when we say create new audiences it's about the work that we do how do we share that in a better way? How do we find a new way to make greater impact around that and how can we communicate that more effectively? So for instance a project we did this year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival was a project called the British Council Edinburgh Showcase and we bring together 27 UK artists from the performing arts and we bring a selection of some of the world's most interesting programmers for the performing arts to Edinburgh and the idea is they come and they see the live performance and then they will hopefully bring that work back to their own countries and present that so it's quite a traditional model in that sense and previous to this year it's always been dependent on those people coming but what we wanted to do this year was to see how we could digitally capture that and how we could share and extend that and as a result of that actually bring the effect of that to more presenters so like a new audience basically in other countries so we created a series of films around all of those different artists so it's a snapshot of their work, their practice and then I interviewed all of those artists about their practice as well and as any of you know talking to anyone who makes any kind of creative work it's very personal and how you frame that can be so sensitive and then once you put that outside to put it on the World Wide Web basically how does that then transfer in communication to people really understand the context around it so it's quite a sensitive area so we film those productions, put them online did an extensive social media campaign around that and then again through the offices that we have we emailed all of our contacts in those countries our colleagues overseas emailed all of their contacts within those communities and the idea being that those people who couldn't come to Edinburgh would have a way to understand those theatre productions have a chance to engage and also then be able to tune in to a webcast where we broke down that programme as well and looked at it in more detail and through that we feel that there's... it's not just that the audience the new audience, the professional audience engage with it but they're continuing to engage all the time because that showcase still lives as a digital showcase online and so people can constantly come back to that and hopefully what will be seen is that in 2011 this is a framing, this is a snapshot of UK theatre performing arts And what are the lasting impacts that you've seen so far in terms of what those video trailers and all the accompanying media that went with them have led to? It's got a fantastic email the other day from colleagues who are running a series of talks in China and they just saw their first talk in Shanghai where they expected to have maybe 20 to 30 professionals who hadn't been to Edinburgh knew nothing about the Edinburgh showcase and were a mixture of people working in the media sector and the creative sector so not necessarily performing arts The event ended up running from being 90 minutes to actually three hours there were over 100 people and tenants in the room and they were showing some of the trailers from the Edinburgh showcase and that's just one of the serious events they're doing they're also running in three other cities around China as well and that's a great way for how that event is properly beginning to network beyond that I think that's the real impact that we were hoping to make so that's continuing in China and it's planned for the countries as well So it began with online content and led to offline meetings and engagement and conversations and that's something that NASA does pretty well too, Stephanie bringing people to experience very new and very different things Could you tell us a bit about your Tweet Ups and how they got started? Sure So NASA has started a series of Tweet Ups that obviously just started with one we didn't expect it to become such a thing but we had our 30th Tweet Up yesterday and the 31st is two weeks from tomorrow so it's become quite a big event essentially what we did is we offered our Twitter followers the opportunity to come to an in-person event at a NASA facility so we advertise it obviously online with social media, particularly Twitter and then we open a registration period anybody who follows us can register and then we do a lottery selection from those registrations we get those people get invited to come so we have events that range from 25 people who are invited to 150 people who are invited and they pay their own way to get there but then we give them some type of behind the scenes or unique access to NASA or NASA facilities, NASA experts So we started small we started with a two hour event at NASA headquarters we had the Hubble repair crew the astronauts who've repaired the Hubble Space Telescope the last time which was what NASA calls STS-125 the space shuttle mission and also contained the first astronaut on Twitter Mike Massimino he's at astro underscore Mike and so we just put this out there we only advertised it locally within DC and then obviously on Twitter and we started getting people applying from all over the country and I started emailing people and saying this event is in person in Washington DC if you just want to watch online or participate online you don't have to register for it and overwhelmingly the response I got was no I'm planning to come I'll buy a plane ticket from California I'll come out we had a guy from Spain who registered and he said I've got my passport what else do I need and so that sort of blew open the doors for us on this idea of people love access and they love the opportunity to encounter NASA and we have a really strong opportunity to expose them to more than they're expecting so they come because they want to meet an astronaut but they get a broader context of what NASA does across the agency one of the things NASA has always struggled with is that people have a pretty strong positive reaction toward NASA if you ask most people they'll say oh NASA that's cool right but if I ask you to tell me three concrete NASA projects that we're currently working on most people can't do that so this gives us the opportunity to take that positive interest that they have and translate it into a real experience real opportunity they get to interact with astronauts with scientists with engineers with NASA leadership who they would never otherwise get the opportunity to ask questions of and then see a NASA center and then so we've grown these into the mega events which are two day events that culminate with a launch of a spacecraft so we did five for space shuttle launches and we have done three more for other spacecraft launches a mission to Jupiter, a mission to the moon, an Earth observing satellite and then the next one is Mars Curiosity launches on November 25th, the day after Thanksgiving and we have invited 150 people to come to Kennedy Space Center to experience the launch and get a behind the scenes tour and they pay their own way we just give them access and we had a thousand people register for 150 spots for Thanksgiving week in Florida so it's pretty cool and I mean the communities that evolve from that we've had more than 2000 people participate in these events we use the same hashtag for all the events so the community just continues to grow with everybody else who's attended an event and they have now created Google groups and a Facebook page and a LinkedIn alumni group and Wikipedia pages and they actually do a lot of the tracking of the events that I don't have the resources to do so they built a Wikipedia page that tracks every time we announce a tweet up and who the speakers were and how many people attended and what their Twitter handles were and they do all of that I don't have the resources for that but the community does it and talk about trust so sorry if I can stop but I can go on and on too please go on so with the launch tweet ups the typically launches are in Florida and there's not a lot of resources in Florida I mean it's a pretty small community where we launch from and so if we have a really high profile launch all the hotels fill up with NASA contractors and people who are in the space community so getting a hotel room if you're just one of these tweet up participants can be a challenge if you're not willing to spend a lot of money so for the third to last space shuttle mission we had a tweet up and the community decided to rent group houses so they would identify a vacation house and they'd get 10 or 15 of them together to rent a house together well the catch is that none of them knows each other so they are agreeing in advance of meeting each other that they'll share a house that how they'll split the money who's gonna make the down payment all of these things they all arranged on their own and I watched it from afar and I was sort of like I would never do that I would never like find 15 people on Twitter and decide to rent a house with them and not know what their personality is until you show up and maybe they have a really annoying habit but it's been remarkable and so most of them had such a positive experience that they told the next group you have to get group houses you won't have the same experience the community experience if you don't stay together so the event is now more than just the event that we host because they leave us and they go to their group house and they have a partner group party and you know it's quite a thing and it's a leap of faith too though for NASA to invite all these people that they don't know oh yeah for a government agency that seems not only the first on Twitter but let's just invite you all here to our launch too what do the scientists and astronauts think of getting to interact with the public well that has actually been a really interesting journey as well because in the beginning trying to convince any of the astronauts or scientists to participate in the event and trying to describe the event in a way that they would understand and sort of get the idea of just inviting people off the street to come in and ask them questions was a challenge but it's been so successful that now when we host an event I get more offers for speakers than I have spots for so I'll get people from across the agency who say oh Stephanie you're having a tweet up do you need an astronaut to come talk because I'll come talk to the group and the thing that is different for them is most of them participate in news conferences so that's their primary interaction beyond the four walls of NASA so they're used to dealing with long term space bee reporters or worse a reporter whose agency cut their space bee reporter and so they work on the news desk but they've been assigned to go do this story on NASA and they know nothing about us so they ask less intelligent questions of our experts and so the tweet of participants on the other hand before they show up we say okay here's the press kit here's everything you need to know about the mission here's the mission's webpage and they come with these really smart questions and so our speakers and scientists love them because they're getting asked really intelligent questions about what they're doing and to the participants who come the scientists and the astronauts are like rock stars so if you're a scientist who's never been noticed for your climate change study but you get an audience of 150 people who have paid their way and are asking you really smart questions you feel like a rock star so it's been a cool experience for both sides because it's great for the public to get the opportunity to have the experience of being around NASA scientists and engineers and real rocket scientists and it's great for the people at NASA who it's so easy to get mired down in the bureaucracy to have interaction with people who are really truly enthusiastic about what we're doing. So you really are bringing different communities together through these mediums. Yeah, tweet of participants come from all over I mean all over the world, all over the country all every profession, every age group I mean I've seen all sorts of participants it was just great, I love that we get a cross section. That's really cool. Now Danny you're trying to get a cross section too within DC and other than People's District and the stories you're profiling there can you tell us about some of the other projects you've worked on that have brought online and offline together in some different ways? Sure, I mean beyond just documenting the stories because at a certain point I realized that you know people were just reading but how could you actually get them to engage and so the first thing I did was I built a curriculum for DC High Schools with the idea of going in and having students understand how they impact their community and so we did a number of projects but one of them that I thought was maybe the best one to talk about here is is this question of if you had a friend who was coming to visit you and then they were from out of town and 10 minutes before they showed up you had to leave but you could leave this map and this map had the 10 people or places that they needed to know about or they needed to avoid to understand where you live and so we did this over on Benning Road and it was incredible to view the city as a 17 year old does so I get things like when my mom is home the best place to make out is at the park behind the rec center or there are these two carryouts next to each other but don't go to the one on the left because they don't give you enough french fries you gotta go to the one on the right so what if you could take that and you could ask a policeman or a mailman or a guy who's been hanging out in the corner how do you build these layers onto the map so that one neighborhood which is already experienced in thousands of different ways now has this texture so that could be one example I built a branding campaign for the Noma neighborhood out in northeast it's a neighborhood that's still up and coming and was really sort of trying to get an understanding of what it means to live there so I went out and I interviewed about 60 people and these words kept coming out these people felt like they were pioneers for moving into a neighborhood where buildings were still coming up so took all these stories, built a campaign but then what we did was we took an unused retail space and we converted it into a neighborhood walk of fame so if you're ever in the Noma neighborhood it's by the New York Avenue Metro across from the Harris Teeter you'll see these 13 photos and stories and these are these neighborhood personalities the guy who's run the auto shop for 40 years or the lady who's at the Harris Teeter or the guy who cleans the stores but it's all these people who have this incredible history in the neighborhood and now we've done work to celebrate them we're working with the mayor's office to celebrate how the city maybe celebrate some wrong word to commemorate how the city has grown 10 years after 9-11 so we built a video story telling booth and started to collect these narratives from people and tied them all together but the idea here is to create an experience that lives in three places one is the experience with the person so that exchange of sharing your story feeling relevant, feeling like you now are part of something larger the second is about the curation of taking that piece and then creating something whether it's a public art project or a video or building curriculum for public schools or building branding campaigns and then the third one is how it's actually how people activate it how they engage with it so taking things like QR codes near field technology recently I started writing talking points and putting them in bus stops so with this basic question that said or a question of statement that said don't panic should you find yourself next to a stranger please consult these talking points and I put three of them down based on your level if you were a beginner conversationalist an intermediate conversationalist or an advanced and they ranged from my what blank whether we're having today to hello my name is what is your name but the idea to try to get people talking because when they talk again it goes back to that the thing with Erica when people start talking they start to sort of better understand these things that are not about the people that you already know but the people you don't know and whether it's the changes in your neighborhood or if you have an elderly neighbor who can't go shopping herself then at least you know that if you go out on Wednesday maybe you can go ask her and you know it's again it's sort of it's adding the switchiness to yourself and the switchiness to your community and finding ways of taking the stories taking the experiences and taking them offline so that they're in people's everyday lives so it's very much a multi-layered experience it sounds like and that's something that comes in with the work that you do Deborah as well you were telling me about one project Connected that introduced new ways of people getting to know one another and interacting more deeply than before can you tell us what Connected was and how it surprised you and how it played out? Yeah I think it's important to say first of all that like a lot of the work that I'm doing as well is with a performing arts community or with artists as well and generally it tends to be a little more niche so it's always a challenge to see how can you create some kind of understanding around what that is and then also how can you bring a wider audience in so the Connected Showcase was a showcase of interactive performance that happened in Tokyo two years ago now and what was interesting about that was that we brought together a group of artists who never would normally identify themselves as being interactive artists but there was a showcase that I curated and it was a combination of artists who either made work using technology or were influenced by technology as well and what was sort of really interesting when they came together as a group of people they sort of first of all they said to me they are sort of like are you mistaken? Do you understand the kind of work that I make? Am I really the person you need on this? And by coming together and understanding each other's practice they really then began to understand actually what was shared about it as well so I think it was a whole new way for them to begin to look at each other and what we did also one of the pieces that really comes to mind is one of the artists called Duncan Speakman and he makes audio performances and it's quite sort of interesting in terms of the work that you're doing as well Danny it's about taking public space and trying to find new ways to interpret public space so we had a social media community that operated first of all around that artist and you could log on to that community and download an MP3 file onto your own personal iPod or whatever player you have and then you listen to that and that's your way in first of all to what this piece of work is but then when you get to or in Tokyo the audiences in Tokyo were able to experience that performance on the streets so what it meant was that for people who previously had no idea who this artist was suddenly you're part of a social media community and we're talking and discussing and learning more about these artists then listening to that on their MP3 pair and then also in the street at a particular time in the evening it was programmed between six and seven p.m. it's actually the image was there earlier and people could actually listen to that together and suddenly you had this very sort of online experience become a very rich offline experience where people shared in something as collective and what was really interesting was that obviously within Japanese society that sort of personal body contact can be quite limited and one of the key parts in the performance was where at a certain moment the audience were sort of split in two so different groups of people were moving through the city listening to different parts of the audio and then came together at a certain point and were suggested that they would hug the person across the street so it was quite choreographed and people actually hugged so that was where that image is from of people actually hugging in the street in Tokyo it was a very different way for people to understand what that sort of art is but also how those artists then themselves identified themselves as well through that. Great. I have one last question before we open up the Q&A and this is really because we're here at New America where questions about access to technology have taken place on this stage many, many times. Do you all feel that the new communities that you're trying to reach have access to the tools they need to engage in these online spaces or are there people that still need to be brought into the discussion? Danny, do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I think the oral tradition and you know, joke around that storytelling is the world's second oldest tradition so the concept that it's relatively new or that we don't know how to engage with it is obviously, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the challenge is how to get people to tell stories and maybe it's how to get people to connect and you know, I was talking to somebody yesterday and they were saying, you know, what's, does it matter? And maybe that's another question, like does it matter to people to know their neighbors? Does it matter to people to have these interactions and you know, I would say that I think it matters when you see that there's a value added. I came from a quantitative background in graduate school so as much as I love stories, I also view things in charts and curves and start to see where you can start to see that there's a value from it. So however you wanna look at these things, I think that there is a significant value to it and you know, I would hope that people on all sides will use it and if I stopped doing this tomorrow, people would still sit on their porches and tell stories. The question is, would people sitting on porches across the street from each other tell stories and I don't know how much of an impact I have there but I'd like to hope that through reading these stories, people feel more encouraged to engage with people around them or to go and talk to people that they don't normally talk to. That's a good note to wind up this conversation with I think now we'd like to invite all of you to ask your questions because we are recording this. I'd ask that you wait for the microphone and Tom will bring it around to anyone who has a question. I've got a question here from Twitter. It's from Rhett Rothberg. He asks, and the question is directed to all of you, can government agencies that don't launch fun rockets use Twitter in effective ways? So I guess that question would probably be for Stephanie. Well, Rhett is one of our Twitter attendees. He's been to one of our events. Actually, though I've been invited to speak about what we do at social media and to other government agencies and to other companies. And one of our previous Twitter attendees, David Rosen, who's also a social media strategist, made a very astute comment which I rip off and use in almost all of our presentations which is that even if you don't have rockets, you have a fan base and you have a community and it's your job to bring that community together. And so you have to think about it that way. You have a niche, you have groupies, you have people who are interested in what you do, everybody does, or who consider themselves experts in your area. And it's your job to sort of connect them and find them and bring them together. And with the Tweet Ups, one of the things that we've seen is that it really does give people a safe space to be a space nerd. So there are a lot of people I encounter at the Tweet Ups who say, oh yeah, I was always interested in space, but I did something else for whatever reason and it's cool to come sort of back to space and get reconnected with my interest in it and to meet all these people who also like space. So we bring them together and then they can talk about space together and follow it. And that's where we've seen the biggest conversion rate actually is people who just followed us online previously, they come to an event, they meet other people, they experience space in person, then they become advocates on our behalf to the point where we don't even have to do the work anymore. They're doing it for us and then you can help meet some of that digital online offline world where they are going back to their communities and talking about their experience in person to the people that they're encountering not just online. Thanks, Ryan. My question was about people's district and just you talked about the divide within the district. I was curious if you know sort of how much your website is bridging that divide or whether the people that are following you are mostly the same people who you were shopping in Whole Foods with, particularly given that a Washington Post columnist referred to Twitter as specifically associated with gentrification and the Northwest community and not with some of those other communities that may not trust the medium itself. It's a great question and I view it as, I only know the output by what people tell me. So I get these emails all the time from people who are over the age of 80 who either they'll write themselves or they want somebody close to them will write and say, I've lived in the district for so long and usually the emails are like this. I never knew that, fill in the blank. So I never knew that there was this last Jewish deli outpost on Bladensburg Road. I never knew that there was still a place where you could get Italian bread on North Capitol Street. A lot of it, it doesn't necessarily relate to the people but it relates to what they say, because they're not hitting communities because obviously people know about them, but so for example, I interviewed the head of the Republican Party in DC and people wrote to me and they said, I had no idea that DC had Republicans and these were serious emails, you know? Like thank you for telling me that we have. So people in other cities, they'll reach out to me and they'll say, I'd like to start a version of this in my city and other people around the district, they tell me that too and I think it's wonderful. Nobody should have ownership over stories and I certainly don't ever wanna feel like people's district is the only platform but I would hope that more people do it. So I view my input in terms of people read it, they follow it, they comment, they send ideas, people in other cities, they wanna start their own projects. And you know, I would like to hope that one day people's district is that idea of the one city that Mayor Gray talks about or people like Kojo Nandi speak about on the radio program every day, but it's not there yet and it's growing and you know again, the idea is that hopefully everybody will take a little bit of this concept with them and then it'll help make the city the kind of place that hopefully all of us want it to be. I have a question on the NASA experience which I find extremely impressive. Implicit in the approach you've taken is that it's a very transparent process, the good, the bad and the ugly all come out. With that in mind, my experience with agencies and the private sector as well is that there is this particularly among public relations folks and you are not in public relations. Well I consider it more in communication because when I describe my experience with public relations you may not want to acknowledge that controlling the message is the number one mantra, controlling the message. So I was wondering within NASA have you encountered that tension between the need of among some public relations people to and their leaders within the agency to control the message versus your efforts to open up the agency to a more transparent and open process. There's definitely been periods of tension. The good news is that NASA has a long history of being open and broadcasting what we're doing in real time with very tricky stuff. Spaceflight is not easy. It does, even though we've been doing it now for quite a while, it's still in a test project sort of perspective. So it definitely varies across the agency. I've been lucky enough that a lot of what we've been doing with the Tweet Ups has been in the human spaceflight area. So the Space Shuttle launches, we invited people to five different Space Shuttle launches and the Space Shuttle program has had experience with very visible public reactions to tragedy and so they have become very open about addressing that and dealing with it and that was very helpful in the way that we shaped the Tweet Ups because when you're inviting 150 people to a Space Shuttle launch that may or may not happen or may or may not happen on schedule, we actually joke about the Tweet Ups. I usually in my schtick say that they range from two hours in length to two days. Well, we had one Tweet Ups almost a year ago. It was actually more than a year ago for the launch of the last mission for Discovery, Space Shuttle Discovery. It was supposed to launch on November 1st. It launched on February 24th. So I described that as the 115 day long Tweet Ups. We only made a promise to those people that they would get to come for the initial experience and that's actually one of the reasons why it's a two day event. On the first day they get the program, they get to interact with the astronauts and then the second day is the launch. So we want to give them enough good content and a great experience on the first day that if it doesn't launch on time, on the second day they can still walk away going this was worth it, it was worth it to come. So we've had a lot of experience with that. I've had to re-plan events in real time. Yesterday actually at the Tweet Ups it was at NASA's Langley Research Center which is about three hours away from here. The concluding event of the Tweet Ups was a drop test for the Orion capsule which is the new capsule we're working on to go back out beyond Earth orbit. And the video, I didn't actually get to attend yesterday. So the video, the capsule is pulled back and they let it go and it drops into this basin of water and you watch as the capsule capsizes, right? And so you hear the audio of oh, oh, oh no, oh that doesn't look good, you know? But this is how we do things in real time and we test, you know, this is why we do tests. So it's a good experience, you know? I've had to say on a number of occasions, I'm really sorry, space flight is hard and that resonates with people and it actually does help us get out that message, right? Does that answer your question? Well, like I said, it sort of varies. Right now the administrator is an astronaut and so he's a little bit more comfortable with that on the level of having people there in real time. The argument that I have typically made is when, you know, the leadership has said well aren't you concerned about what these tweets are going to be saying in real time when they're going to be tweeting out? What if I say something that I shouldn't or whatever? And I always tell them, well, you know, you talk to reporters, we don't control what a reporter writes in a newspaper any more than we control what somebody tweets when they're coming to an event and actually by and large the experience has shown that Tweet-up participants are much more enthusiastic and supportive than reporters are. So, you know, it's still that same level of you have to give up the control at some point and you have to recognize that. And so, you know, the best you can do is be well prepared to begin with. I think there was a question in the back. Yeah, I have a question. Some of you have described various projects, the art projects or the group housing rental or the storytelling in the neighborhoods and the local interaction, even between strangers. What do you think are the conditions under which strangers, people have never met each other before will trust each other? Particularly, you can say that people will trust others within a particular community when the only method of communication is 140 characters or less. How do you think the trust is built? What are the conditions under which people will trust each other in such a large distributed setting? Whether for arts or for, you know, hugging each other on the street when that's against the social norm, renting a group house together, things like that that require trust. Well, I would say from the art perspective that definitely nothing brings people together, like really good art. And that then transfers very much online. I think there's no difference between online and offline. So whether it's watching a piece of theater that's just in Arabic, which has been translated into English and comes from a country that most people probably will never go to, Saudi Arabia, and if that's a good piece of content, then I think people have a natural understanding. And there's something then the condition is that there is a shared interest and then there becomes a shared understanding. But ultimately, it's not about forcing people to talk about each other. It's about talking about something first and then being able to evolve that into a conversation. So much in the same way that when we network offline as well, when we go into a room, it's usually more difficult to start talking to each other at each other. It's much better to talk about the coffee or drinking or the talk you've been to. I think that very much is the condition, particularly in arts, where we'll go to the theater and we'll come away from a piece of music and we'll talk about what we've seen because we've experienced something together. I think that very much for online space is about shared understanding. I would say, I think that obviously art is a part of it. Your team winning the Super Bowl or winning some big event, you look at Obama's inauguration, everybody gathered on 14th and U Street, whether you fought against him, but the notion that it brought people together. But actually I think that what brings people together more is unfortunately the negative. So there was an earthquake in DC and everybody in my apartment building ran out and we all stood there together and now we were all residents of the same building who had gone through the same experience and started asking each other, are you okay? Did you, I know there's a woman who lives on your floor, did you make sure she got out? Or I was on an Amtrak train and we stopped in the middle of Delaware and I'm sitting with a bunch of suits and everybody's on laptops and nobody wants to talk to each other and then we run out of power and now everybody wants to start talking. So Sam, I was in New York on 9-11, these same things happen. So you can, I don't know if the Super Bowl win or the flash mob is the equivalent of the negative, but unfortunately the way I've seen it is that it's these things. This is uncertainty, it's where people are challenged and it's sort of the opposite side of the good that creates the circumstances for people to hug one another on the street or to help a stranger or my grandmother who's 88. On 9-11 she was basically carried home by a busboy. These kind of things happen, they wouldn't happen normally. I think it's the shared experience. What we've all described is there's something initially that sort of breaks the ice and brings you together into a community and then you have, from there, you can have a shared experience and obviously for different people there are different levels. I would never rent a group house with 15 Tweet-up participants that I didn't know, so that's a comfort level by individual as well, but I think it starts at that shared experience of the recognition that we have something in common. The Twitter account is gaping void and he talks about social objects and I think that's what these are, shared experience. They're social objects and we trade them just like we do real objects, but social objects are traded, they're traded experiences and stories and those types of things. I think it has to be something a little bit more than that because there's so many things that we share. I mean, I don't know most of you, but we share that we moved to Washington for one reason or another and that was to work. Then there's a preposition in government and around against in spite of, so there's something that connects us. I think there has to be... Well, but yeah, that's what I was saying. That's what breaks the ice, but then if you see a launch together, you're part of this group that you all experienced this launch. Like you said, something... It doesn't always have to be negative, but something big, something meaningful that happens that you all, that you share that experience. It's really interesting and what's the point when things break because we can all be in a collective experience and be very engrossed in something, but what's that little thing that breaks and makes you actually turn around to the person beside you and say, wow, it's amazing, isn't it? Because too often you can stand, particularly living in the UK actually, you're on the tube and it always fascinates me how it's just deathly silent all the time. And even the day after the UK riots just recently, it was even quieter the next day. I was quite surprised that nobody would touch out, reach out and say, how do you think it was last night? And it just doesn't happen. So there's something that sort of happens within us where I think the experience has to be bigger than us or is it disruption to the norm or it's just something that takes us outside of ourselves which makes us lose that sense of risk really and actually reach out to somebody, not be afraid of the reaction we might receive. And I think there's a really interesting thing about taking that online because yes, of course, you can reach out really quickly but what's going to be the breaking point there because you can't see the person so you can't really relate to the reaction until the reaction has actually gone out. And it's something I'm kind of interested in, the idea of digital shyness in terms of at what point some people are really good at sort of really broadcasting and then other people take a lot of time and they need to build trust again and then find a way to connect with you. I think there's a question up here. Thank you. First of all, thank all of you for, this is a very positive, optimistic conversation and turn that in being in the other Washington, Danny in terms of the federal government and the nature of the political discourse today. I'm wondering if there are things here that we're learning that we could host a new kind of discussion and bring people together who have legitimate concerns about governing but the nature of the dialogue doesn't seem to get us to where we want to get to. So the Tea Party on the one hand occupying the other, the political parties in Congress, in your words, do you have any thoughts or advice in terms of curating a new kind of conversation that can resolve problems and come to new solutions? A disruptive innovation to the way we are conducting our governance not only in this country but globally to just be interested if you have any thoughts or ideas on that. Well, I'm currently working to solve the DC race problem so let me deal with that first and then we'll move on to the States which probably shouldn't be that big of a leap but I think you're exactly right and I think that part of it is that we've just sort of moved so far away from each other and again just take it to a DC angle. I mean, part of the reason that I freaked out at Whole Foods was because if I couldn't talk to somebody who was identical to me, almost identical, what chance that I have of connecting with somebody who was not like me and so that's how I went off to do it and I think partly what I came to learn is that with everything you read unless you're fluent in the people who are familiar with that or who experienced it, you lack something significant. So again, gentrification, my neighborhood's changing, I can read everything I want in the Washington Post and local blogs but the truth is that Ms. Taylor who lives downstairs shall tell me a different story and it may not be the right story, it may not be the only story but it's us story and it's a face and it helps to add context. So I think with the Occupy and the Tea Party, I just feel like we can live in an NPR world and watch John Stuart and drive Volvo station wagons and eat sushi and do all the things that we're supposed to being on one side and you can do everything you're supposed to on the other side but again, when you lack that ability of not making it an issue but it's a person, so the issue of abortion is no longer everything that relates to religion, everything that relates to that but it relates to the experience of somebody who's gone through it or the 1% is this guy I used to live next to and so now when I read about this I can compare it into that way and I think that when these social issues, they just become so divisive, I almost wanna just start asking these people, tell me somebody, talk to me about somebody, don't make it about an issue, tell me how this has impacted somebody you know or tell me the story as it relates to this whatever issue you wanna talk about and then let's make it not about that but let's make it about the person and what you learn from that person and I don't think it's gonna solve all these issues but again, when it's not about Republicans and Democrats but it's about my neighbor, it's about the guy who lives down the street and it's about their ideas and their policies and their views then it makes it much more personal to us. Again, thanks so much for this talk, it's really great. I'm working in the government as well and I belong to an interagency community of practice and we were all sitting down talking about community management and can you build a community or are you always starting from a group of people that already existed sort of offline and we determined that it was easier, right? If you have a group of people who already get together offline but I guess I'm interested in all of your thoughts if you're trying to build a community online what are some tips and tricks if the group already exists if the group doesn't already exist in getting people together what are maybe some of your failures that you have learned from and then a tag on question for Danny back to politics, have you ever thought about leveraging the people's district to get DC voting rights? Because I feel like people don't know the story that the District of Columbia has people in it and not just the Capitol. Or just evil Washington. Do you wanna start? How do you feel about voting rights? So I mean I think this has also been a big learning curve for me so when I started I didn't realize how the lack of voting rights would actually impact people on a regular basis so DC lacks a federal penitentiary if you're locked up you can be sent to North Dakota you can be sent to Colorado many people know about the issue relating to the lack of funding for needle exchange programs which is partly to blame for DC having the largest HIV crisis in the nation it's actually a level that's higher than many places in West Africa but the list goes on and it relates to issues of infant mortality African American women with breast cancer I mean you start to see that DC is great in so many ways and it's also great because it's been a failure to so many of its people it's most vulnerable. So I find these stories and I tell them but what I think is interesting is when you look at what the threshold is in our society now about interest and that is a like button which means almost nothing in the world you click you like something and it means that something shows up in a stream that you check on a regular basis that you can now hide and how many people like DC vote or how many people gather online in this most simple way to say I live in DC I spend my days working to bring about change for the whales against the whales in spite of the whales whatever reason you're here for it's clear that people are politically active and they can make change but there's not this investment here to say that while I'm here I'm gonna invest in the fact that I am an American living in our nation's capital and I'm not able to full voting rights. So I think we need to start with that basic question of how do we how do we get people talking about it how do we get people to like something and then beyond that I mean I worked at the Treasury for three and a half years never once did people gather outside of the White House and say I live in this city and I should be voting I mean we should all care about that issue I mean many of us are gonna be transients and we'll stay and we'll go but while we're here seems to be something that we should care about so these stories draw the attention to the people who every day are struggling with this issue the lack of statehood with the hope that people will they'll learn more and then hopefully they'll do something about it. The first part of your question was best practices for bringing online communities from offline ones Deborah do you have any thoughts on? Yeah we sort of through all the projects that I've done we build communities and what we've learned first of all to give you a mistake or a failure but it was a test so I think it's good to fail sometimes is that basically building something around time based events can be a very costly process and doesn't always live what you want as well I think the first thing to do about building communities why are you building it for what purpose to what end and also if you build it what will happen when it flips out of control and becomes super successful and you end up with sort of a huge community of people that you suddenly realize you don't have the resource to maintain them they have an expectation around you you've nothing more to give them the events over the projects over the mission has changed the message has changed whatever it is and I think if you're building community you need to take responsibility for that community before you begin and I think people too often think oh let's quickly set up the social networks they can all be done in an afternoon it can all be up and running but what does that really mean and what are you trying to say so I think it's just the it's the offline questions that you ask which will really deliver the online results Stephanie you're part of an active online and offline network with TN 2020 how does that work where you all meet together offline only occasionally but you're pretty active online yeah well so in the TN 2020 group it brings together people on both sides of the Atlantic and young people who are engaged and active and I think partly what helps is we have this really intense bonding experience right so we have an in-person event where we all meet each other and have a few days together to talk about really important issues the summit is always focused around some interesting or thought-provoking issue and so we all come from different backgrounds and we have this intense experience together and then you connect and obviously with some people the connection continues pretty strongly and with others it sort of fades away a little bit but you know one of the things I love about TN 2020 is that when I get up in the morning and I look at my Facebook stream it's all people in Europe and across the rest of the world who are in the middle of their day or at the end of the day and so I say much more connected to what's going on from a worldwide perspective instead of being so just US centric even the nightly news here is so focused on the US and world news is what 30 seconds of the newscast so to me all those people have become my world news and so they have become the way I connect to really from a I know somebody there who's experiencing that and they're my friend to some degree and so it makes it more real and more personal to me to be connected to them and then we do you know people let the good thing about being in DC is people come through here so you know when they come through the states they know they'll take a visit and we'll have a bunch of us we'll get together and talk and you know usually there's somebody bring somebody else who's not part of the network and so it sort of just grows this community which is great there are a couple here Santel is anyone else here oh Marcia yeah so great good people we have another question somewhere uh isn't your definition or the way you use the word trust is a little nebulous because all the examples you give are sort of self-selected you know people are selecting to do what you want and and then they go away so of course they would tend to have some affinity with the other people that selected the same thing you don't try to get it right and it will let the people in the NASA well they're interested in how the space right they'll come in and and the other people although the interesting thing with the Tweet-Ups is there tend to be a lot of people who register from the tech community but not necessarily the space community so they hear from their tech friend we have a lot of people who work at Twitter who register for our events which I think is great but so we I think it's more broad than you would think just from a space community more as the Tweet-Ups have continued more and more people have told me they registered because they knew somebody who attended one and they had such a great experience not because they themselves were a space nerd so I have said I've been known to say before you know we don't expect you to be a space geek when you show up but we hope that you'll be one when you leave but the trust thing is actually really interesting because we are literally inviting people from Twitter to come in person to NASA facilities at you know high-risk times like launches and we are giving them access to NASA centers at Kennedy Space Center they have the ability to drive themselves to and from the press site this is a secure NASA facility now they do have to go through an additional check before they come but we essentially give them rules and we are trusting that because they are getting this sort of privileged access that they will respect those rules as a result of getting this access knowing that if they break the rules that could affect the whole community it could affect our ability to host an event again it could affect you know their fellow participants because we have had rule breakers and we've had to deal with that but thankfully the community helps self-police right so enough people have a common interest in everything going well that they will you know I don't have to do very little of it you know there are enough people in a hundred and fifty who are rule followers who will tell the others to follow the rules right so that helps but it is I mean I live in fear of the day that one of the Tweet of Participants does something terrible and we do things like we went to Wallops Flight Facility and we checked out the Taurus II rocket that Orbital Sciences is building and we went into a room where we couldn't have any electronic transmitting device right because we could blow up the rocket so I'm taking fifty people into a room and trying to make sure that none of them has a key fob or a blackberry or an iPhone or anything that is transmitting and knowing that if they do this could end very very badly for me and for the whole community right that's trust to me any other questions I think we'll take one more a lot of what you guys have talked about is about bringing people from behind a computer screen out into the actual outside world and meeting and everything do you foresee that as the future of social media and the way people interact with all these online or is it still keeping people behind their computer screen I don't think it's an either or really I think it's um I think social media and digital is it's a new communication tool for us it's a new communication tool in many different ways, shapes and means but I don't think it's an either or I think that we increasingly live in a society where we have choice and we have choice whether we want to participate offline because we can choose if we want to I think increasingly people are looking towards the more zen aspect of being totally plugged out and supposedly in the future I think very soon that we'll move towards wanting to go on holidays where we'll be completely plugged out where we'll have no contact will be no connectivity but I don't think that we need to make decisions certainly not if people are managing community to trying to bring people together that we will decide to have either offline or online activity I think you really strengthen both if you bring it together and it's about going back to that point point of really trying to find where people are at and finding where people are comfortable and so it's not about enforcing something upon them it's about giving them a way to give them access to what it is that you're doing but to make a very comfortable route for them and usually that route tends to be quite circuitous where you may meet them online or you may meet them offline but generally things will interweave and it'll become more cyclical Yeah I agree I mean my you know my idea is that one day you know social media 3.0 or 4.0 will just be the table and chairs and that'll be what we go back to and you know if I became mayor of benevolent dictator what I would do is just put a table and chairs in every street corner of the city and I would you know so many cities are thinking creatively about how do you bring people together through public art or through public space but this notion that again I think that there's so many values and you look at these communities of people who thought that they were alone or individuals who thought they were alone and then they find their people online and then they get together so you know all those things are wonderful and I don't want to downplay them but you know I would love nothing more the happiest times of my life are sitting around tables with food and with things to drink people that I know and some people I don't and with the hope that we somehow move back into that direction and maybe that will be what the response is when you have eighty four accounts you need to follow and seventeen twitter feeds or two hundred fifty twitter feeds and all these other things and maybe that'll just be how we slowly respond to it I agree I think it's a circle you know that you are online and you are offline that's the same way you are with your family and your friends and and all those people one of the interesting things that we've seen with the tweet-ups for some of them we've allowed people to bring guests and for some of them it's been your registrations for you only so you you are the only person and the thing about the the events where we don't allow people to bring guests they come in as single people right and they don't know anyone if you bring a guest you have sort of a comfort level you're coming with somebody you know who you're friendly with you have less incentive to reach out and talk to other people around you so the I think the more rich in engagement experiences are those for which we don't allow guests because everybody comes is alone and they all have to meet somebody and they have to talk to somebody and one of the things that we do with the tweet-ups is we spend an hour an hour and a half passing around the microphone saying tell us your name tell us where you're from tell us what you do and one interesting thing about you and that's my favorite part is hearing people say what they're one interesting thing about themselves is and then watching the connections happen within the room right so these people are connected before they show up they know who else is coming but they don't know about that person then they show up and they're like I went to that school or I do that as a hobby or you know those sorts of things and that's what makes the connections and then they go away with a friend and then you know they walk away from the event and they have this buddy that they've experienced it with it's really cool that is a great thing I was just gonna say one more thing in terms of the offline online even though we're using the term I mean I really think it's going to become an obsolete term as well if you think about if you were to talk to any six year old and ask them the difference in online and offline I mean it used to be digital natives but now it's just getting younger and younger and younger in terms of there will be no difference to someone it's just a way of being and going back to the table it's like well we're still human so we may have this you know even the sort of the fact this is the panel about trust through technology trust is a human value and that will always rule the day and I hope it rules the day it's the world I want to live in certainly and so I think we'll take that to every choice that we make in relation to technology that's a great note to end on I think and going on Stephanie's point about meeting people you don't know please join us all of you around the corner we're headed to the science club now on 19th street where we have platters of advertisers waiting and drink specials just for us and there are a few technology related groups there that may join our ranks as well tonight and my colleagues will leave you around the corner there if you're not familiar so please congregate by the elevators and thank you all so much for coming tonight