the Mark Pike

In under 24 hours, I recently designed and built a web presence for a symposium on green building law. The entire process was one of the most exciting experiences I have had in law school

As the Technical Editor of William & Mary’s Environmental Law & Policy Review, my main job description is to maintain the journal’s online resources. The journal publishes several volumes a year, and each article’s citations and sources must be checked by our staff and uploaded to a shared server.

Prior to this year, the journal did not have much of a public face on the Internet. We are mentioned on William & Mary’s website, but the administration controls that space. This makes it very difficult to promote our scholarship and comment on how our work is applicable to contemporary environmental policy issues. Without an online publishing interface, we were locked out of the discussion; constantly playing catch-up with an archaic printing press process.

Now, with our newly designed website we were able to host a symposium that instantly put us in the mix. The summaries of the panels we hosted this past weekend have been getting views from all over the globe. Our old journal articles are getting a second-wind. We are influencing the policy discussion.

And, I learned a ton about Web 2.0 during the process. In an effort to give symposium attendees the chance to broadcast their commentary onto the site, we not only had comments enabled, but also embedded a box that featured a stream of live Twitter messages.

I had no idea how powerful Twitter was before the symposium. I’ve long been a fan of Facebook’s status messages and assumed Twitter was just another overlapping service. It’s not. By utilizing a “hashtag”, Twitter users at the symposium could essentially create an impromptu digital huddle and share their reactions with fellow-attendees, as well as folks thousands of miles away. This is something Facebook fails at because of its reliance on the friend-based social network instead of an interest-based network. Eventually, I see the two services merging and Web 2.0’s collective knowledge offerings will be even more powerful. Very exciting.

After an intellectually stimulating weekend, the journal has a permanent online home; and, I madesome new friends in the field of green building law!