Image: Initial whiteboarding of "what does an online festival look like?"
Over the last few years EWFdigital has grown to be a significant part of the Emerging Writers’ Festival. Thanks to social media and smartphone adoption and some innovative and engaging programming EWF audiences are engaging across both virtual and real worlds. In 2012, with the arrival of myself and Pierre as “geeks-in-residence” we began exploring the idea of what a festival might look like if it was held completely online.
You could have a keynote address…but just taking a single video of a keynote seems a pretty dull way to engage with the medium. And then, there are other questions…what does a panel look like online? How do we capture the conversation of a festival online…we know it is happening…how do we present it? Do we need to?
We are looking forward to sharing a wide range of innovative and different online programming at EWFdigital 2012. It will still intersect and engage with the festival itself, but it will also stand alone. It will bring digital writers from around the world to your screen and they will share their insights and experiences of how words are working in digital environments.
There will be a keynote, panels, workshops, conversations and curation – all online. There will be content presented, and a chance for you to provide and add your own content. At EWFdigital we won’t ask the question “who is the writer and who is the audience?” – it doesn’t matter to us in online spaces anymore. What matters are the words and how we use them.
And, there is still some time for you to help us out. We are looking for blogs from around the globe, in other languages if possible, to reflect the diversity of writing and words in the online space. If you know any good blogs, please drop me a line at daniel@emergingwritersfestival.org.au
