AmmanTT and The Foot issue!

Note: The views and ideas presented in this post are purely mine and i take full responsibility for them.

Today we had AmmanTT's Social Media II Edition, a follow up on the social media edition that was held back in July. This event was prepared in a short notice and the idea of it was to get back to the 1st of the month theme that we started with after deviating from it in the past two months.

We sought companies who uses social media as a part of their business core, and we had a scenario setup and we thought of trying the panels format this month after we saw how interesting it was in the MENA ICT forum, now what could go wrong with that? Expectations, simply what people expected was a different event, and i guess it's our fault that we didn't give the event more preparation time. But over all, the event was successful to some people, and bellow the expectations to a lot, in my opinion, it was a perfect timing for us to learn something new.

In the past few months, AmmanTT was received very well from the IT audience, and with each month we were receiving greater demand and more expectations, which is a great thing that we all are happy to have and proud of the support we get from the community, but as team members, we get busy with work and we try to give AmmanTT a good amount of weekly hours to make it a successful event that meets all the expectations, but you can never meet them all, as for some people who are always negative or try to impose a certain way of thinking, everything should be marked bad or in a negative way.

At today's event, some audience started to talk about feet and arabic speaking, as i am with the second one, and i support all what was said (Not the jokes, but i LOL at them) the first one was the one i would like to stop to talk about, now we all know that feet facing faces or setting in a certain way is not acceptable in our culture, but the way the issue was handled from a well known lady in the crowd was not polite nor a professional one from an ex-candidate who might have became a parliament member that will represent us.

The way it was handled: few tweets started about a panelist setting with his legs crossed and his shoes bottom facing part of the audience, asking him to put it down and show more respect, later the tweet feed was filled of jokes and comments about it (the shoe size and that kind of stuff). when the questions time came, the lady took the mic and the first thing she said to a respected CEO that "Put your feet down when you talk to us!", this comment made a lot of people uncomfortable, and personally, i lost a lot of respect for the lady, it was an awful, rude and a not respected act. we all know that you are popular and very respected, but please, respect people before you expect them to respect you!

The way it could have been done: wait till the end of the session, reach out for the speakers, tell them that guys this is not appropriate and such words, they will learn from it, never do it again, and we all live happily ever after.

One part of making this problem viral was that the moderator didn't know what was going on, we failed at providing a tweets screen in front of the moderator so that he can take the proper action at when the issue started, but that was not the case, and it took too long and the end was an ugly baby that nobody with a sense of respect will appreciate.

From my perspective, we learned a lot today, and it was a good but painful experience, and i assure you that all of this will change, last week we started putting a new operational plan for the team that will be more effective and more organized than what we have now, and with your valuable feedback and support we are changing and trying new stuff that will help make the AmmanTT event a much more enjoyable learning experience.

Remember, if you are welling to put the time and effort, please join us at the team and help making the world a better place :D

End of thought!