So, I’ve just started working on the Amplified project, having been there right at its inception, at the discussions that went on about what we wanted to do and why, what was needed and what the way forward was for taking social media beyond the echo chamber of people who already got it, but kept the wealth of knowledge within their little groups.

A lot has happened since then (and it was only a year ago!) – twitter has gone mainstream, newspaper blogs are getting greater and greater prominence in the profile of their ‘brand’, and we’ve entered a recession that has lead to vast numbers of people in all walks of life – in business, the creative sector and in the charity/NGO world – exploring the value of direct communication with their clients, audience and co-creators via social media platforms.

In this environment, the initial idea behind the Amplified events and concept seems even more prescient – to provide a space and an emerging methodology for the sharing of ideas, resources, encouragement and inspiration for any endeavor seeking to explore the knowledge-sharing, community-building and wall-removing qualities of social media tools. As a “complimentary therapy” to the old school business medicine of advertising and big budget networking events, it makes so much sense that the naysayers are mostly not worth engaging with any more.

Today, I’ve been live blogging PICamp in Belfast – Political Innovation Camp is an amplified-style unconference, organised by the team behind the Slugger O’Toole political blog. Having the political focus lead to it being a smaller group than at some of the other Amplified events I’ve been a part of, but it also leant a progressive coherence to the sessions, as the conversations evolved from one session to the next, drawing on so many themes of political engagement, transparency of governance, democratization of information, new ideas for policy consultation, trust issues online, youth and politics… So many amazing themes and conversations emerging, and I captured as much of the day as I could over on my blog.

The Amplified ‘ammobox’ – the tech we take to each session – is a developing tool set, built around capturing media, aggregating content put online by attendees, live blogging and live streaming sessions. The refinement of what needs to go into the box is a tricky process, working on both an optimum set-up, and a back-up plan if things don’t work…

Today, I got the webcam/ustream/newsdeck set up working, but the wireless was too slow for me to be able to webcast a session from across the room with any clarity, and the format of the day ended up not lending itself to running a fully ‘virtual session’. But it was a useful experience, and I was glad to have Audioboo as my primary media capture option – Audioboo’s intuitive, simple interface, simple embed code and high quality audio make it the perfect solution for events like this.

What was also clear was how much easier this job is when many people are blogging, tweeting, photographing and capturing the day – I did a flickr search towards the end of the day, and I was the only person who’d uploaded any pictures. The hashtag search for #picamp on twitter proved very useful though, as people went with the ‘one tweet’ amp-idea and pulled out the quote that summed up the session for them.

I went one better and got people’s one-tweet style summations of the day in an audioboo right at the end:

We’re now booking more Amplified events, I’ll be at most if not all of the upcoming events, refining the capture, streaming and blogging. If you’re going to be there, and want to help out, do drop me a note, either via my site, or here in the comments.