Google Wave Book

In Google Wave: Up and Running I include a sample use case for using Google Wave to hold a virtual international conference. The idea behind the use case is that Google Wave is quite suitable for multi-national communication and collaboration that can occur in both real-time and delayed time. Adam Vaughan at The Guardian (UK) has a real life story that highlights this point. In "Young people negotiate Copenhagen deal using Google Wave" we can see how over 1,000 people from 140 countries have been using Google Wave to discuss, debate, and collaborate on issues related to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Google Wave has proven to be a great tool for these young folks, although as Adam points out, the access to the Web that so many of us take for granted was hard to come by in some cases:

Access didn't come easy to some of those participating in the online debate between 15 to 25 year olds around the world. The Global Youth Panel has some inspiring stories from Iranian debaters who bypassed web censoring software and a Bhutan who team persuaded their ISP to offer extra bandwidth. Meanwhile a coordinator in Cambodia gave IT training to 30 kids from "some of the poorest, most destitute families in Cambodia" so they could take part.

It seems that the panel debates have produced a good amount of discussion, which is nicely memorialized in each wave. You can check out the waves used for the debate by using this search in your Google Wave inbox: with:public global youth panel debates And if you're wondering why the debates occurred in Google Wave instead of other online mediums, the article includes this salient point:

But why use Wave rather than, say, email or Wiki-style software? David Crane of Debatewise, which organised the youth panel, says "there's no way we could get this many people debating in real-time otherwise." He also points to Wave's real-time typing feature as being useful for such a fast-changing event as Copenhagen, because it makes it easy to answer a question before it's fully typed.

I expect that this is only the beginning, and soon we'll see Google Wave being used to facilitate an increasing number of online debates and conferences. And perhaps it's apropos to mention that making events more accessible hopefully will reduce the carbon footprint associated with traditional conferences that require extensive air travel and/or accommodations.