I gave a talk at Communities and Technologies 2009 on June 25.  Just got around to getting my slides online, Pathable:  Leveraging Social Software for Social Networking and Community Development at Events. 

Here’s the abstract of the paper described in the talk:

Professional networking is a primary goal of people attending conferences and events. Over the past year we developed a social networking and community tool for events, Pathable, to help attendees meet the right people. Pathable provides an online directory of profiles, communication tools, and a recommendation system optimized to help people meet based on commonalities. We performed a deployment study and found that quality of conversations and sense of community were strong predictors of who said they would return. The more people used Pathable to meet others at the event, the greater their event attachment and sense of community.

It was a great event.  Very academic, small number of attendees, but all first tier researchers in the field.  Had a lot of great conversations.  Using community tech for social participation, civic intelligence, and social advocacy were the hot topics.