Mahiti was the Social Media Partner for The 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) held in Hyderabad, India from January 10th to 14th, 2011. The Conference was being held in South Asia for the first time; and in a departure from the past, was hosted by a practitioner organization - Foundation for Ecological Security (FES).
The plenary session was addressed by Dr. Elinor Ostrom who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economic Governance in 2009, "for her analysis of economic governance, especially the Commons".
There were about 900 delegates form around 69 countries who had participated in the IASC 2011 conference.
The conference was address by the Guest of Honour Shri Jairam Ramesh, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Environment and Forests, Government of India and Key Note Address by Dr. Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (2009) 'Cooperating for the Common Good: Challenging Supposed Impossibilities and Panaceas'
Following are the tasks done by Mahiti during the conference .
The key note session and other forum discussions comprising of experts was streamed live in the IASC Commons Blog. People who were unable to attend the conference had the option of viewing events live through the blog. This was highly appreciated by many followers with evidence of users from across the globe.
Live tweets were made throughout the duration of the conference covering various topics discussed at the sessions. This made a tremendous difference in reaching out to many more people and opened up conversations with people beyond the participants of the conference. This is evident from the large number of hits registered to the site from twitter.
The blog was continuously updated during the conference with immediate uploads of sessions for people to catch up with the event even if they missed the live telecast of the session. With the Video-on-Demand tool, users were able to search for videos on sessions on specific topics and interest with relative ease. News articles and press releases were also put up on the blog to give online followers a wholistic view of events in the conference.