The future of conference posters: ‘hipster and geek!’

Abstract

What problems were addressed? Our abstract for a workshop at a national general practitioner (GP) conference was accepted … in the form of a poster! How could a workshop designed as a focus group, intended to provide a safe space in which GPs could discuss their personal concerns in relation to sexual health consultations, possibly become a poster? What was tried? We designed an interactive, data-generating poster. The physical poster was mostly empty except for four trigger statements to which participants could respond by writing either on the poster or on Post-it notes. These comments in turn would prompt others and thus generate the poster content during the conference. To provide multiple ways to join the conversation, our poster employed two other tools: participants could connect with an electronic survey via a QR (quick response) code, or through Twitter links, or join a conversation on Twitter. We opened a separate Twitter account and chose the hashtag #hardconvos. Tweets advertised the poster, and comments from the poster were tweeted during the conference. Tweets containing the hashtag #hardconvos were collected as data. Although others have mined Twitter for tweets with specific content, this appears to be the first attempt to generate qualitative research data via Twitter.