I’m not a member, and so I don’t know if it’s my place to be giving advice to ALIA. All I’ll say is that I think that it is extremely normal and not at all sinister for any organisation – whether it be a commercial enterprise, non-profit or other professional association – to want to know what other people are saying about it.

I don’t see anything sinister in an organisation ethically monitoring publicly available information sources. After all, there are quite a few people like me in the Special Library sector, who do this as a part of their job.

I also think that an organisation which takes the time to monitor such conversations (which is basically listening) might as well then participate in the conversation as well, because that’s where the real payoff is. It’s also annoying and messy at times, but that’s the way it goes.

I am very excited by ALIA’s Event 2010 wiki. I do not agree with the point of view that it is impossible to have a good event without two years of planning.

Morgan Wilson has also given an interesting response, including a reaction to your comments on a post on his blog, confessions of a little brother who is also a librarian.

I liked his musings about searchability of the archive we leave behind with social media…and whether how much the drawbacks of engaging may outweigh the benefits.

As I was falling asleep last night, it made sense to me about why a couple of people were pointing out to me that ALIA had emailed their members about the IFLA announcement. I had been puzzled – of *course* they emailed their members. If they hadn’t then I would have pointed that out in my post, it’s just what organizations *do*. It just didn’t feature on my radar as part of what I was talking about – the human to-ing and fro-ing that could have happened after the initial bombshell and how to cope with new media.

It would have been remiss of ALIA not to email the majority of their members who are not engaged with social media, but that wasn’t the focus of my post, so I hadn’t mentioned it. I received the initial message from two listservs, an email from ALIA and three peoples’ Twitter accounts within the space of five minutes. What I was interested in was what happened after.

In a useful move, ALIA has set up the ALIA Event 2010 WIKI where people can give their thoughts on what event should replace IFLA, given that ALIA Biennial and the New Librarians’ Symposium were not going to run in 2010 due to IFLA.

just a little something more on mylee’s point about your question: “can – and should – library professional organisations monitor all places where their members may be discussing what they do?” my perspective here is a little different to mylee’s. yes, twitter is a back channel, but it is one that alia is choosing to be active in. would it be big brotherish for alia to monitor the conversation happening in the twitterverse? well, there’s another choice here, too, beyond the organisation’s choice to be in the space: the choice to be followed by alia. i’ve made a conscious decision to follow organisations but to decline requests to be followed by organisations. i pondered this decision for some time before i made it. for me, twitter feels like too personal a communication channel for me to open up my tweeting to organisations. put simply: i whinge there. do i want my professional association seeing all of that?

but those people who have private twitter streams and have chosen to allow alia (or any organisation) to follow them have made an entirely different decision: they have decided they want that organisation to listen to their tweeting. i don’t think it’s big brotherish for that organisation to weigh in on the conversations of people it follows, where those conversations are about it, or are relevant to it (or even if they’re not relevant to it – i can’t tell you how many conversations i’ve jumped into since i started using twitter just because i’m amused or interested). by requesting to follow someone, you (or the organisation, in this case) are implying that you’re going to read what that person tweets, that there will be some kind of engagement with that person.

if any organisation chooses to be present in these spaces, and in particular, to follow other participants in these spaces, then in my opinion, they have to be prepared to engage in dialogue in those spaces.

should professional associations monitor all the spaces in which their members might be discussing what they do? well, call me a control freak, but if there was a conversation happening about me, or about an organisation i’m invested in, then i’d kind of want to be hearing it (and participating in it!). if the conversation is happening in a space in which the organisation is ostensibly participating, then yes, i think there is an expectation that the conversation will be monitored (which is precisely why i choose not to be followed by organisations), and that the organisation will engage with the people it follows through dialogue.

i think organisations – any organisation, not just professional associations – need to be careful about jumping in to spaces like twitter. there are expectations in these forums – immediacy, transparency, dialogue – that are scary, potentially burdensome (in terms of workload related to responding to comments etc), and essentially entirely new concepts for many organisations. for this reason, i think participation in these forums should be something that is thought-through, with the risks acknowledged and mitigation strategies in place. if you’re in it, you’ve got to be really and truly in it. twitter isn’t a broadcast announcement service – being in it means participating in two-way conversation.

communication through traditional channels on this issue has been good, so well done on that front to alia and ifla. having said that, i heard about it first via a friend’s status message on facebook and second via a tweet, then went looking for the official line. a tweet with a link to the press release would have meant my first information about the cancellation would have been from the organisation’s perspective, not from the perspective of my disappointed facebook friend.

last but not least, the board blog: like mylee, i feel for all the people who’ve worked hard on ifla and i’m disappointed that we won’t see an ifla in australia in 2010. this would have been a tough call for both associations to make, but it was ultimately a sensible call. i’d love to have been able to express this sentiment in a comment on the board blog.

I think in answer to your question “Can – and should – library professional organisations monitor all places where their members may be discussing what they do?” the answer is probably NO. We all acknowledge that Twitter is a back channel – a less formal space for conversations where in the extreme brevity of 140 characters short telegrams flash around at breakneck speed. I think it’s great that many of us are using Twitter and that ALIA has jumped on board with @ALIANational but I would hate to think that the association was monitoring all of our communications – that sounds a bit too much like Orwell’s Big Brother in “1984” for my liking.

You also ask “Can – and should – organisations choose to continue the conversation via other media, rather than where their members are having discussions?” That strikes me as an odd question – as a librarian I always look to verify the sources of information, and I’m wary of Twitter, in particular, since there are so many fake celebrities twittering. When I saw the first message I went looking for official press releases from both IFLA and ALIA to be sure I could believe it was happening.

I guess you noticed that IFLA does appear to have a Twitter account http://twitter.com/IFLA but there are no messages there at all despite the current situation surrounding their conference.

The Cluetrain manifesto speaks about “markets” and yes, I suppose, ALIA does have a market of Australian library workers and institutions – yet many of those workers are not ALIA members. I think ALIA’s first loyalty is to its members and as a member I received an official email within minutes of the official announcements. I’m also pretty sure that if we took a straw poll a lot of ALIA members aren’t on Twitter or monitoring blogs so the official communication has to reach the majority not just the technologically adept (no criticism of people who prefer pens and catalogue cards intended).

So Kathryn, here is the challenge for you, as Mahatma Gandhi said “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” So please stand for the ALIA Board at the next election and help ALIA be all it can be.