Sharing your ideas on Twitter can be a dangerous thing, especially when you are tired and haven’t completely processed the potential outcomes of this action. This is what happened to me over the weekend when I tweeted out a not-even-half-baked idea of having an online English language teaching conference on Twitter.

What was even sillier of me (blame it on the fact I was fighting a cold) was I posted it shortly before heading to bed. Since the Twitter world never sleeps (it is relentless), I woke up the next morning to way too many notifications. Apparently, people have not only embraced the idea, but have already moved into the planning stages!

In all seriousness, I’m really pleased to see so many people jumping on board. That response has led me to this post. While I would love to take this idea on and run with it, the truth is I would need some help. Looking over all of the replies to my original tweet, here are some ideas on how I envision the conference working and areas where I would need some help to make this work (in no particular order).

• A call for proposals would be put out. People would submit proposals for short (10-15 minute) sessions that could be broadcast live on Twitter. Since you would be constrained by the live broadcast function of Twitter, it would be advised that presenters find creative ways to present their session online. Details and guidelines would be hammered out with the conference team.
• Proposals would be reviewed and a tentative schedule would be put out based on information given by presenters who have been accepted. Each session would also be assigned a unique hashtag
• On the day of the conference, presenters would go live on their own account a minute or two before they are scheduled to give their session. This would give people time to click on the live feed before the session starts. The speaker would also use the unique hashtag in their tweet. This allows people to find the session and also the official Twitter account for the conference could then retweet the session.
• At the end of the conference, all of the recorded sessions would then be curated using Twitter Moments.

Here is where I would need help:

• Marketing – someone has already stepped forward for part of this, but it would be good to get one more one board for this.
• Moderators – these would be people who would help presenters (virtually) and would make sure to collect questions and comments during the sessions. We would need quite a few of these. The actual number would depend on the number of sessions.
• Reviewers – this group would review and approve session proposals. Again, it would depend on the number of submissions.
• Twitter account administrators – a smaller group would be needed to tweet out the live sessions as they start. There would need to be people from different time zones to take care of this.
• Schedulers – a small group that would put together a schedule based on the accepted proposals and post it for attendees.

Thoughts? Suggestions?