backchannel
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A backchannel is a place for conversation that is off-topic, or for a community to communicate safely and privately. The latter can be very important for marginalized groups.
IndieWebCamp has a backchannel for off-topic conversation at #indieweb-random. This chat is not logged, but it is still public.
Articles
History
Conferences
Chat (typically IRC) backchannels used to be (early to mid 2000s) a fairly consistent feature during various technical and web related conferences, sometimes even projected behind speakers while they were speaking. Unfortunately this eventually led to impolite, rude, or outright abusive comments.
Past examples:
- 2005-12-05…06 Les Blogs (https://web.archive.org/web/20060202101211/http://lesblogs.typepad.com/) backchannel incident (was on freenode #lesblogs)
- https://benmetcalfe.com/blog/2005/12/les-blogs-me-mena/
- https://web.archive.org/web/20051221041234/http://www.blogherald.com:80/2005/12/07/mena-trott-implodes-on-stage-at-les-blogs-calls-participant-an-asshole-after-lecturing-audience-about-the-importance-of-civility/
- https://cubicgarden.com/2005/12/08/ben-and-mena-and-the-internet-conversation/
- https://www.theregister.com/2005/12/08/lesblogs_nice_call/
- https://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3048/mena-trott-1-ben-metcalfe-0
Some time in 2007 conferences started to display a feed of tweets using the conference hashtag, instead of using an IRC channel which was an improvement for a while.