At the very first THATCamp, the registration page required a participant’s Twitter handle. The effect was to force all of the attendees who didn’t already have a Twitter account–which was most of us–to sign up. Afterwards, the obvious next step was to follow the other participants, since maybe this Twitter thing would help us get to know each other before the unconference. I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of the organizers, but I suspect that that one required field has played a role in making Twitter such a vibrant place for practitioners in the digital humanities.
THATCamp LAC has two hashtags (#thatcamp and #lac) for participants to use in addition to the THATCampLAC account used for organizational announcements. It turns out that you can search for both hashtags at the same time, so it’s easy to follow discussions about the unconference. I’ve also created a public list from all the participants who listed handles (all but me, actually, since I wasn’t able to figure out how to add myself to a list) which should track all the breakfast- and cat-related tweets from participants as well.
