The Ambassador Bridge, via Wikimedia Commons. Original by Mike Russell, CC 3.0 S-A
As many in the argumentation studies community know next week is OSSA 9, one of the bigger events on our calendars. The conference theme this go around is “Argumentation, Cognition and Community”. Having had a look at the schedule I think this promises to be an interesting conference. Many leading scholars in argumentation, informal logic, rhetoric, and normative pragmatics will be there presenting and responding to papers. There is also a good range of strong papers by up and coming scholars as well. This is one to look forward to, if you’ll be coming.
All the pertinent information for OSSA, including .pdf downloads of the schedule and abstracts among other things, can be accessed here.
Unfortunately, as we all know, not everyone who would like to attend can attend. These are tough times and many of us find ourselves at institutions who can’t always support travel to events like these as often or to the degree that they would wish. For those who won’t be coming but want to follow along, I thought I might propose a conference back-channel on Twitter with the hashtag #OSSA2011. Those of us who have Twitter accounts and will be there could post about discussions, sessions, workshops, and everything else OSSA between sessions or whenever else we have the chance. That way those who cannot come can follow along. An added benefit is that those of us who are there will be able get to know each other a little better and to coordinate a little easier when it comes to dinner plans, taxi rides, etc.. (To get a better idea of how it works, you might check out this post from the innovative and consistently helpful ProfHacker blog on the Chronicle of Higher Ed website.)
If you’re interested, let me know! You can comment here or post to Twitter including “#OSSA2011” somewhere in your tweet.
RAIL 
Unfortunately this didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. There were reasons for this, I think. I heard more than once, for example, that in many of the buildings it was hard to get a wifi/3g connection. It may also be that as this was an international conference, Twitter may not be as widely in use in the home countries of many participants as it is in North America. Of course there’s also the possibility that, caught up in the pace of the conference, folks simply were too engrossed in other things to bother–I know I myself often struggled to find a few free minutes to post. Still, learning about these barriers makes the experiment worthwhile.