The big themes at last week's Sun Customer Engineering Conference (CEC 2006) were Web 2.0 and sharing- and we were asked to participate rather than simply observe (sounds like Burning Man-- nobody is a spectator!). A new approach to Q & A was taken during the general sessions where attendees were given an SMS number, an email address and an AIM handle to which we could send questions to or answer questions posed by the speakers on stage. Hidden behind the curtain of the main stage was a team of Ozma-like wizards that filtered the wheat from the chaff and determined what submissions would be viewed by presenters on stage and occasionally displayed on the big projection screens. The experiment was a success and will definitely be a feature of future Sun conferences. Before the conference we were encouraged to bring our multimedia toys to the conference and blog everything. The results are all over the place.
At one point, (one of the presenters, I don't remember who) posited that in a few years CEC might become a mostly virtual event. The use of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies may allow for the conference to become a completely virtual event. I think a lot of money would be saved, but there is no true substitute for having 3200 engineers rubbing elbows in meatspace. As long as the wireless network can withstand the resource contention caused by thousands of laptops logging in at once to comment on whether or not Jonathan should cut off his ponytail if SUNW hits x$ per share, then I think the idea of Web 2.0 technology married to having everyone in the same place at the same time has legs left in it.
In addition to the use of these relatively old technologies(AIM/email/SMS) to augment the conference general sessions, on the closing day of CEC 2006 Jonathan Schwartz riffed on the possibility of holding Sun press conferences in SecondLife, the 3D virtual online world that is conspicuously missing level bosses, red dragons and BFG 9000s. This possibility rapidly morphed into reality Friday with the announcement that Sun Chief Researcher John Gage and Sun Chief GamingOffice Chris Melissinos would be hosting a press conference in Second Life.
These events have combined together to kick start the discussion on collaboration technology. Shawn riffs eloquent on SecondLife, Web2.0 and Collaboration, GSE Divas report on the CEC experiment.
So, here are some random thoughts....
I think an ideal conference collaboration platform would.....
I found a good list of collaboration tools here: http://www.gilgordon.com/resources/products1.htm
At one point, (one of the presenters, I don't remember who) posited that in a few years CEC might become a mostly virtual event. The use of Web 2.0 collaboration technologies may allow for the conference to become a completely virtual event. I think a lot of money would be saved, but there is no true substitute for having 3200 engineers rubbing elbows in meatspace. As long as the wireless network can withstand the resource contention caused by thousands of laptops logging in at once to comment on whether or not Jonathan should cut off his ponytail if SUNW hits x$ per share, then I think the idea of Web 2.0 technology married to having everyone in the same place at the same time has legs left in it.
In addition to the use of these relatively old technologies(AIM/email/SMS) to augment the conference general sessions, on the closing day of CEC 2006 Jonathan Schwartz riffed on the possibility of holding Sun press conferences in SecondLife, the 3D virtual online world that is conspicuously missing level bosses, red dragons and BFG 9000s. This possibility rapidly morphed into reality Friday with the announcement that Sun Chief Researcher John Gage and Sun Chief GamingOffice Chris Melissinos would be hosting a press conference in Second Life.
These events have combined together to kick start the discussion on collaboration technology. Shawn riffs eloquent on SecondLife, Web2.0 and Collaboration, GSE Divas report on the CEC experiment.
So, here are some random thoughts....
Human speech is arguably the most efficient and instinctual form of communication. It is highly effective at communicating emphasis and emotion. MOST humans have the hardware built in for processing it. Language differences are the only drawback, yet can be overcome with live or post-event text and/or verbal translations. Thus, conference collaboration tools that take advantage of live audio by participants would have an advantage.
Conference collaboration tool requirements differ from your usual collaboration tools -- you need to scale to 1000s of participants.
It would be cool to see the interactive experiment held during the CEC 2006 general sessions rolled out to some or all of the breakout presentations at future CECs.
The large number of non-native English speakers at CEC impressed upon me the need for collaborative conference tools that enable inclusion of all attendees, regardless of language proficiency. Speakers may choose to present in their native language and pick translators (or have them provided for them).
....which brings up a need to debate live translation of presentations versus after-the-event translation for sharing via conference archives. Yep, conference archives. Tools that would allow for a conference and it's interactions to be archived would place said tool into the upper left of the communication channel matrix I found on Martin Hollmichel's blog in his excellent post about choosing the right communication channel.
I imagine an interface where one combines video/visual aids, audio, text chatsand supporting documentation along with a speaker/Ozma managed "talking stick" feature for arbitrating audio/video interaction byparticipants. I also can envision the pranksters among ustaking great advantage of an unbuffered (like the x second dump capability that FCC wary radio and TV networks use) video stream being fed live to thousands of conference participants.
Combining human speech with the written word (slides/supportingdocumentation/text streams from attendees) goes a long way to ensuring that the message has the best chance of being absorbed and understood. Archival of everything helps those of use who have to be hit with the clue bat more than once.
Foreign language support can be inserted as live translations (audio ortext) of speaker and "talking stick" holders. Live transcription in general will help for remote attendees that can't/don'twant to listen or are hearing disabled. Not sure if on-the-fly machine translation is there yet,
I wish we could have seenthe raw text streams (SMS, email, AIM) duringthe general assembly CEC 2006 presentations.
I think an ideal conference collaboration platform would.....
allow for each presentation to be archived and re-played via same interface.
allow client pause/rewind/fast-forward/record capabilities for live audio/video streams ("Did Jonathan just say what I thought he said?")
need to be tolerant of poor internet connections. Client software would monitor inbound video streams and gracefully give up if certain thresholds are not consistently met. Clients pushing audio and/or video should monitorability to write data upstream to collaboration servers and either start reducing stream quality or give up gracefully. Servers may also monitor feeds to clients and dynamically reduce quality/resolution/frame rate of feed to accommodate client abilities and network conditions
need to be able to scale to tens of thousands of users. Users who share a common network(conferencenetwork or office network) may benefit from multicast transmissions of"main feed" from collaboration servers.
have several interface feature subsets or modes - one for attendees and one for presenter/"stage hands"/translators
accommodate video sources: whiteboard, live desktop video, slide show, video file
accommodate audio sources: speaker mic, "talking stick" client mic, text to speech translation, human language translation
accommodate text sources:SMS, AIM, email, IRC, collaboration interface text input
I found a good list of collaboration tools here: http://www.gilgordon.com/resources/products1.htm
