A tweet from joeyanne alerted me that today is Blog Day 2008. As I only found out about this at 6.30 pm today I will have to be brief in my list of blogs that I find interesting.
The instructions for contributing to Blog Day are:
- Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting
- Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending them as part of BlogDay 2008
- Write a short description of the Blogs and place a link to the recommended Blogs
- Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st)
My blogs, which may not necessarily be new to many readers of this blog, I’m afraid are:
- The Ed Techie blog by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University - and someone I have had valuable Twitter discussions with.
- The unspun Electronic Museum blog, in which Mike Ellis argues passionately for the adoption of light weight Web 2.0 approaches within the museum community.
- The Digital Curation blog in which Chris Rusbridge, in particular, provides a remarkably refreshing insights into preservation issues, even going as far to ask whether the “‘Digital Preservation’ term [should be] considered harmful?“.
- The JISC Access Management Team blog, probably the liveliest of the blogs published by JISC programme managers.
- I mentioned Tony Hirst’s Ouseful blog in a previous list of my favourite blogs, but as that referred to an old version of the blog I feel I’m allowed to mention this blog again, which Tony uses to write copious summaries of his prolific development activities.
And as today is Blog Day I thought this would provide an opportunity to launch the first of a series of brief video blog posts entitled Video blog 1: Why I Blog which I am publishing in order to support a workshop on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library” which my colleagues Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman will be facilitating at the ILI 2008 conference.
If you are a blogger and want to give the reasons why you blog why not sign up to Seesmic and respond to my post, explaining why you blog. You never know, you might get mentioned when Marieke and Ann run the workshop. There’s a marketing opportunity for you, especially if you are a blogging librarian.
Technorati tag: BlogDay2008
The final workshop organised by the JISC-funded Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) will take place at the University of Manchester on Friday 12th September 2008.
Now you may think that preservation is a pretty dull topic, compared with the exciting developments that are taking place in a Web 2.0 environment. And if that’s what you think, then you’re not alone. As Alison Wildish, head of Web Services at the University of Bath described on the Web Services team blog:
We were asked by our colleagues at UKOLN (who organised the event) to deliver a brief talk detailing our approach to preserving web resources at the University. Our initial reaction was that we had little to say. Lizzie’s remit lies with the paper records and I am responsible for managing our website - ensuring it meets the needs of our users. Neither of us felt web preservation was something we had expertise in nor the time (and for me the inclination) to fully explore this.
And you can even listen to Alison and Lizzie Richmond (University of Bath records manager, archivist and FOI coordinator) expand on this by viewing the Slidecast of the talk they gave at the first JISC PoWR workshop:
If you listen to the end of the Slidecast you’ll hear Alison and Lizzie describing how they discovered in the course of the discussions reasons why Web preservation is a topic which needs to be treated seriously.
But how should one go about Web preservation? What should you preserve? What should one discard? What are the implications of use of Web 2.0 on preservation policies? Whose responsibility is this? What are the costs associated with preservation? And what are the costs and associated risks of not developing and implementing a preservation policy for your Web resources? And how does one ensure that an institutional preservation policy is sustainable and embedded withn the institution?
These are some of the topics which have been raised on the JISC PoWR blog and will be discussed at the workshop. But hurry up and book you place, as the deadline for bookings is Friday 5th September. And note that the workshop is free to attend for members of the higher and further education community.
And finally I should point out that the case study given by Alison Wildish and Lizzie Richard has been saved from being trapped in the non-interoperable world of the past, accessible only to Doctor Who (and even then only on a good day) by recording the talk and synching the recording with the slides and hosting this on Slideshare. You see, preservation can be enhanced through use of Web 2.0 services. Digital preservation can be cool - even though, arguably, it may kill the odd polar bear :-)
The term ‘amplified conference’ was, I believe coined in a blog post by Lorcan Dempsey in which he observed that ” It is interesting to watch how more conferences are amplifying their effect through a variety of network tools and collateral communication“.
It will be noted that Lorcan didn’t seek to define what he meant by the term, but was merely observing a pattern of uses of networked technologies at events being made, in Lorcan’s example, at a number of JISC events, although such uses predate this as I described in a paper on “Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences” published in June 2005.
But we don’t seem to have an agreed definition of the term. And this can be problematic, especially if we decide that we want to host an ‘amplified conference’.
So I thought I’d set the ball rolling by describing what I mean by an amplified conference.
The term amplified conference describes a conference or similar event in which the talks and discussions at the conference are ‘amplified’ through use of networked technologies in order to extend the reach of the conference deliberations.
The term is not a prescriptive one, but rather describes a pattern of behaviors which initially took place at IT and Web-oriented conferences once WiFi networks started to become available at conference venues and delegates started to bring with them networked devices such as laptops and, more recently, PDAs and mobile phones.
We can observe a number of ways in which conferences can be amplified through use of networked technologies:
Amplification of the audiences’ voice: Prior to the availability of real time chat technologies at events (whether use of IRC, Twitter, instant messaging clients, etc.) it was only feasible to discuss talks with immediate neighbours, and even then this may be considered rude.
Amplification of the speaker’s talk: The availability of video and audio-conferencing technologies make it possible for a speaker to be heard by an audience which isn’t physically present at the conference. Although use of video technologies has been available to support conferences for some time, this has normally been expensive and require use of dedicated video-conferencing tecnologies. However the availability of of lightweight desktop tools make it much easier to deploy such technologies, without even, requiring the involvement of conference organisers.
Amplification across time: Video and audio technologies can also be used to allow a speaker’s talk to be made available after the event, with use of podcasting or videocasting technologies allowing the talks to be easily syndicated to mobile devices as well as accessed on desktop computers.
Amplification of the speaker’s slides: The popularity of global repository services for slides, such as Slideshare, enable the slies used by a speaker to be more easily found, embedded on other Web sites and commented upon, in ways that were not possible when the slides, if made available at all, were only available on a conference Web site.
Amplification of feedback to the speaker: Micro-blogging technologies, such as Twitter, are being used not only as a discussion channel for conference participants but also as a way of providing real-time feedback to a speaker during a talk. We are also now seeing dedicated microblogging technologies, such as Coveritlive and Scribblelive, being developed which aim to provide more sophisticated ‘back channels’ for use at conferences.
Amplification of a conference’s collective memory: The popularity of digital cameras and the photographic capabilities of many mobile phones is leading to many photographs being taken at conferences. With such photographs often being uploaded to popular photographic sharing services, such as Flickr, and such collections being made more easy to discovered through agreed use of tags, we are seeing amplification of the memories of an event though the sharing of such resources. The ability of such photographic resources to be ‘mashed up’ with, say, accompanying music, can similarly help to enrich such collective experiences (such as the Animoto clips of IWMW 2007 and UKOLN’s Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks Workshop).
Amplification of the learning: The ability to be able to follow links to resources and discuss the points made by a speaker during a talk can enrich the learning which takes place at an event, as described by Shabajee’s article on “‘Hot’ or Not? Welcome to real-time peer review” published in the Times Higher Educational Supplement in May 2003.
Long term amplification of conference outputs: The availability in a digital format of conference resources, including ‘official’ resources such as slides, video and audio recordings, etc. which have been made by the conference organisers with the approval of speakers, together with more nebulous resources such as archives of conference back channels, and photographs and unofficial recordings taken at the event may help to provide a more authentic record of an event, which could potentially provide a valuable historical record.
Well that’s my initial attempt at trying to define what I understand by the term ‘amplified conference’. I should add that in this post I’m not discussing any of the limitations of amplified conferences (which I’ve commented on previously). My final comment is to point out that I actually organise ‘amplified workshops’ and ‘amplified seminars’ but neither of these terms seem to have the resonance of ‘amplified conference’. So I suspect we should probably stick with this term to refer to a range of events.
Does this definition work for you?
I was alerted to the MyBristol portal via a tweet from Mike Ellis who commented on the URIs it uses:
woa - check out the beautiful friendly url’s on UPortal… http://tinyurl.com/5uwr8k
Now I’d agree that
https://portal.bris.ac.uk/mybristol/tag.7ef20678c7572c37.render.userLayoutRootNode.uP?uP_root=root&uP_sparam=activeTab&activeTab=1
is a rather ‘uncool URI’. But I was more interested in the MyBristol portal service itself and, in particular, the portal toolbar which is available for the FireFox browser:
The Add Newsfeed option “allows you to maintain a personalised set of newsfeeds“. Wouldn’t it be great if every institutions provided a service like this, which allowed your news feeds and your bookmarks to be stored in a managed environment - if it would also allow such data to be seamlessly stored on your preferred external service as well (perhaps del.icio.us or Diigo for your bookmarks and Google Reader or Netvibes for your news feeds).
I feel that the ability to store such resources on a remote service is needed in order to gain the ‘network effect’ that popular remote services can provide. But I’d also like to have a managed local copy, so I wouldn’t have to worry if the remote service went down, its performance was unreliable or if I was concerned about the privacy implications of storing sensitive information remotely. And I’d like such services to work transparently so I wouldn;t have to worry about managing plugins myself.
Are such approaches being developed?
But what about less well-known services? What happens if such services do break? After all, as my colleague Paul Walk has recently pointed out and “there is a growing, commonly-held belief that we are about to enter a global recession” and as “venture capital can become harder to find in a period of economic down-turn” Paul asks “is this a good moment for HEIs to begin a brave experiment with outsourcing services to remote companies?” .
An example of a Web 2.0 service which has become broken happened to me recently. In January 2007 I came across the Squirl service. I wanted to explore a number of Web 2.0 services, so I used Squirl to keep a record of the books I was reading. The service has links to Amazon, so I simply need to type in the title of the book, select the appropriate version and it will store a description of the book, including an image of the cover.
That was fine until and by February 2008 Squirl was keeping a record of 42 books.
But when I finished reading the next book, I found that the link to Amazon had stopped working. I thought no more of it (it wasn’t a mission critical service, after all) but went back to several times afterwards, after reading more books.
Eventually I went to the Squirl groups and discovered a series of messages complaining about the service, as illustrated. And unfortunately there has been no response to any of the messages from anyone working for Squirl. It was also unfortunate, I felt, that Squirl didn’t provide a blog about their service, which I could add to my RSS reader and use various RSS filtering tools to help spot any worrying announcements or concerns raised by the users.
I can still create entries manually (although this does not pull in the images from Amazon). But as the service was still working apart from retrieval of the metadata from Amazon I wasn’t too concerned, especially as I had checked that there was a data export function when I signed up for the service. But when I tried to export my data as a CSV file I got the following error message:
Sorry, we screwed up.
An email has been sent to somebody at squirl, and we’ll try and fix the problem as soon as possible. You might be able to find what you were looking for with the search engine above.
If the problem persists, please contact broken@squirl.info.
And rest assured, somebody is going to get a permanent letter in their file for this. I mean, heads will roll.
I first saw this error message back in February, I think, and I’m still getting the same message in August :-( Even worse, when I send an email message to the address given above I find that the email address no longer exists.
Fortunately as the service provides an RSS feed of my data I have been able to retrieve my data. But this experience has helped to identify a number of approaches which one should take to help minimise such risks in the future. I think ideally the steps would be:
- Find out details about who is providing the service. Is it well-funded? Is it likely to, for example, be sustainable through the current troubled economic times?
- Does the service allow the data to be exported? Can the data be exported in a rich format, allowing the service to be recreated without too much difficulties?
- Check the data export functionality and import into a new service.
- Possibly replicate the data in a complementary service (note this is something I do with this blog).
In addition to these points related to the service and the data I would also look to see if the service provides announcements and discussions using blogs rather than, as in this case, forum software as I add feeds from the third party services I use to my blog reader which allows me to periodically check for any untoward discussions in a single place.
It might be felt that having to implement such processes for any Web 2.0 service could be very time-consuming. But, of course, across a community we are likely to find uses of such services being made by others. So perhaps what we need is to make use of social networks to share our experiences, and have mechanisms in place to alert others to any possible problems (and I’m alerting other Squirl users of problems with the service 6 months after I first spotted them).
Of course, in order to ensure that we have our risk assessment processes in place we will also need an audit of the services we use. That’s a topic I’ll discuss in a future post.
I recently noticed a referrer link to this blog coming from the Answers.com Web site. I’ve not visited this site before so I thought I’d visit and use the service to find an answer to a question. The question I thought I’d ask was “What is JISC?” And, as shown below, I found that “The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research by providing leadership in the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in support of learning, teaching, research and administration. JISC is funded by all the UK post-16 and higher education funding councils.“.
This answer is taken from the JISC entry in Wikipedia. Similar results are found by asking questions such as “What is UKOLN?” and “What is Bath University?” as well as for more general questions such as “What is research” although for questions such as “What is education?” the answers are drawn from a variety of sources, with the Wikipedia definition to be found after results from sources such as The American Heritage Dictionary, Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition and the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia.
What are the implications of this? The first, unsurprisingly, is that if information about your organisation or your areas of interest are available in Wikipedia, then the Creative Commons licence which is assigned to the material will help to ensure that this information is surfaced in multiple locations.
And perhaps more subtly, if you don’t use Wikiepdia, or you require that your students don’t use Wikipedia, you may find that you are inadvertently using information held by Wikipedia and made available via others services such as Wikipedia. In the search for JISC the top entry was clearly labelled as coming from Wikipedia, but in the example of “What is education?” the first set of references came from more traditional sources of information, and if you scroll down you may miss the citation details for the entry from Wikipedia.
My view is that providing information about your organisation of the topics you care about in Wikipedia will help to maximise awareness of and an interest such information. And failing to provide such information on the grounds that people shouldn’t use Wikipedia is mistaken. But if you do make use of Wikipedia you should be careful to provide an objective and encylopedia-like definition and avoid the trap of the entry sounding like an advertisement:
The Internet Librarian International Conference Is Ten
This year sees the 10th anniversary of the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference. This year’s event, ILI 2008, will be held at Novotel London West, London, UK on 16-17th October 2008. And, unfortunately, it will be the first ILI conference I won’t be able to attend. I have spoken at all of the ILI conferences and have also been a member of the programme committee and chaired sessions for a number of years.
My Involvement In ILI Conferences
Details of all of my talks at ILI are available on the UKOLN Web site. In light of the forthcoming anniversary I thought it would be interesting to produce a timeline of my involvement with the conference. I used the Dipity software to produce the timeline of my involvement in the ILI conference series, as illustrated below (and I should add that an embedded version of this is available on the UKOLN Web site, which also provides access to a locally managed copy of the data, so that potentially the service can be recreated if the Dipity service is not sustainable).
The conference has been of particular relevance to UKOLN, as it has provided an opportunity to actively engage with the communities served by both of our core funders: the academic libraries and the JISC development community together with those working in public libraries. Producing this timeline has provided a useful opportunity to observe and reflect the topics which have been of interest to these communities over this time.
Talks On Web Standards
My first talk was entitled “New Standards on the Web” and I described emerging new Web standards, including a range of XML standards (XLink and XPointer) and RDF. Looking back at the presentation (and the references to related work such as Eric Miller slide’s on support for RDF in Netscape) I can see how naive I as in my expectation that the emerging new W3C standards would be quickly deployed in a mainstream service environment. I gave another talk on standards at ILI 2003 entitled “HTML Is Dead! A Web Standards Update” in which I avoided the complexities of Semantic Web standards and focussed on data formats including SVG and SMIL. Again I was soon able to appreciate that the market place had little interest in these standards, although my comments on the importance of and XML and CSS, for example, were appropriate and timely. The final talk I gave related to Web standards was given at ILI 2005 and was entitled “Facing The Challenges Of A Standards-Based Approach To Web Development“. Here I reflected on the failure of various Web standards to gain acceptance in the marketplace and described the ‘contextual approach to use of open standards’ which I had been involved in developed for the JISC to help avoid repeating the costly mistakes made in the past when open standards (e.g. Coloured Book software) had continued to be advocated even after their failures had been widely acknowledged.
Web Accessibility
A talk on “Benchmarking Of Library Web Sites” given at ILI 2002 included a description of use of automated Web accessibility testing tools. The following year, at ILI 2003, I took part in a Web accessibility panel session entitled “Web Site Accessibility: Too Difficult To Implement?” and this time I gave one of my first presentations in which I argued that the traditional approaches to providing accessible Web resources, based on implementation of WCAG guidelines, was flawed. Two years later the joint UKOLN/Techdis holistic approach to Web accessibility had been developed and at ILI 2005 I was able to run a half day workshop with Lawrie Phipps on “A Holistic Approach To Web Usability, Accessibility And Interoperability“.
Best Practices For Publishing E-Journals
ILI conferences have provided a dissemination opportunity for various projects I have been involved in. I gave a talk on “Electronic Magazines: Issues in Implementation” at ILI 2000 which described the EU-funded Exploit Interactive e-journal. The following year, at ILI 2001, Marieke Guy and myself ran a half-day workshop session on “Publishing Web Magazines, e-Journals & Webzines“, the first of four workshop sessions I have facilitated at ILI conferences.
Other Areas
Other topics which I’ve covered at ILI conferences have included advertising on Web sites (at ILI 2001), new devices on the Web (ILI 2002) and quality assurance for Web sites (a half day workshop at ILI 2004).
Web 2.0
Since ILI 2004 the main focus of my involvement at ILI has been related to Web 2.0. The first talk was entitled “Beyond E-mail! Wikis, Blogs and Social Networking Software“, with a talk on “The Sceptics View Of New Technologies” being given in a panel session at the ILI 2004 event.
A talk on “Email Must Die!” at ILI 2005 described the benefits of various Web-based collaborative and communications tools, and, at the same event I continued to argue the need to adopt a critical approach to the new technologies with a talk on “Folksonomies - The Sceptics View“.
I was invited to chair a session on Wikis at ILI 2006 and, due to the late unavailability of one of the invited speakers, also gave a brief talk on “Reflections On Personal Experiences In Using Wikis“. My main talk that year was on “Web 2.0 and Library 2.0: Addressing Institutional Barriers“.
Finally at ILI 2007 Kara Jones and myself ran a masterclass on “Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library” and I gave a talk on “The Blogging Librarian: Avoiding Institutional Inertia“.
Returning To ILI 2008
I had intended to participate at the ILI 2008 conference, but as I have been invited to present a paper at the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference, I will unfortunately not be able to attend. I will be there in spirit, though with my colleagues Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman this year facilitating the half-day blogging workshop.
I would like to take this opportunity to give my thanks to everyone who has helped to make the ILI conference series such a great success, especially the conference organisers (including Marydee Ojala, Jane Dysart, Nancy Garman, David Raitt, Bill Spence, Jean Mulligan) and the people I’ve met at ILI (too numerous to mention, but I should include Michael Stephens, Mary Peterson, Frank Cervone, Karen Blakeman, Phil Bradley, Darlene Fichter and Peter Scott). All my best wish to everyone at ILI 2008 - and all the best for the next 10 years.
In a recent tweet Matt Jukes alerted me to the MarkMail service. As Matt forms part of my trusted “interesting Web applications alerting services” I went to the Web site. What I found was a search interface across over 4,300 mailing lists. A search for ‘ukoln’ provided me with not only various posts containing this string, but also details of the person who made the post, the lists posted to and also, as shown, a graph of the numbers of posts over time.
Initially I felt that the graph supported my view that email is dying, but a search for a more general term, “web”, showed me that this was clearly an inappropriate conclusion to make based on this evidence.
But perhaps of more relevance is the main point that Matt made in his tweet:
just discovered http://markmail.org/would be cool if jiscmail lists were searchable here as well..
Yes it would be great if JISCMail exposed its mail archives to third party indexing services such as MarkMail. But to do that (or rather to do that effectively) would require the JISCMail mail archives to provide ‘cool’ application-independent and persistent URIs (which they don’t currently do) and allow robot software to access the resources. Doing this will, of course, require the service to commit resources to develop work and make changes in policies. A popular and large scale service, such as JISCMail, would only be in a position to do this if they could see tangible benefits to their user communities. I hope the example of the MarkMail service illustrates the potential benefits of opening up one’sdata to third party services. I have to admit that I find the JISCMail search interface so poor that I seldom use it. Exposing the data to other services (whether MarkMail, Google or whatever) would enhance access to data available in the JISCMail Web archives, without JISCMail having to wait for the underlying Listserv software to conform with fundamental Web architectural principles.
I recently attended the JISC’s Innovation Forum. One of the most interesting of the plenary talks was given by HEFCE’s John Selby. In his talk John praised the work of the JISC and the JISC Services, but went on to warn of troubled financial times ahead for the educational sector. The glory days of the past 10 years are over, he predicted.
This was probably not unexpected. What did surprise me, however, was the figures John quoted which put the carbon cost to the environment on par with the cost of flying - both at 2%.
This generated much debate at the forum, and, later on at the conference meal and in the bar. Although people questioned the accuracy of these figures, and wanted to know how these figures were obtained, there was an awareness that the carbon cost of IT is an issue which the IT secure needs to address. I should add that I subsequently came across details of a forthcoming Government Goes Green conference in which Malcolm Wicks, Energy Minister, BERR was quoted as saying that
”ICT is now responsible for around 2% of global CO2 emissions. The public sector, with annual IT spending of £14bn, has an important role to play in reducing this two percent. An increased focus on sustainable procurement and efficient use of IT products are two key areas that it needs to work on and I am very pleased to see a conference dedicated on this.“
At the JISC Innovation Forumdinner I found myself sitting next to colleagues from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). I suggested, partly in jest, that although there was a clear need for continued development of networked services which are popular with the users, we had to ask ourselves where the costs of preserving digital resources could be justified. If, as we learnt from Alison Wildish’s recent presentation at the first JISC PoWR workshop, those involved in Web development activities tend to focus on the pressing needs of their user communities and find it difficult to justify diverting scarce resources to preserving resources which are no longer of significant interest to the institution, why don’t we stop pushing the notion of digital preservation. And not only will this allow the development community to focus their efforts on responding to pressing user needs - but removing archived files from hard disk drives could result in significant savings in energy.
This approach would then both help the users and help save the planet :-)
As I’ve said this was intended as a joke, over our conference meal. But we realised that their may be benefits for the digital preservation community in making such suggestions. After all, preservation is widely considered as worthy but dull. If digital preservation was regarded as something radical, might it have a greater appeal to developers? Could those involved in digital preservation work - harvesting old Web sites and even implementing OAIS models - find themselves repositioned as members of an underground radical movement, secretly preserving digital artefacts for a society which regards such activities as unacceptable. Fahrenheit 451 for the 21st century, perhaps.
Now scientists may point out that running large scale server farms in locations near glaciers and the ice cap may increase the rate at which they melt. But the ideas which were bounced around at the event did make me wonder whether centralisation of networked services (e.g. running applications hosted by Google or Yahoo or running our applications on Amazon’s S3 and EC2 servers) would be more beneficial to the environment than all of our institutions running our own local servers.
And perhaps such discussion might be useful in a teaching context. Does data curation, for example, conflict with environmental protection? If so, should we forget it? Or could this approach result in deletion of the very data that could save the planet
What do you think?
And if you’d like to take part in a viral marketing campaign which seeks to make digital preservation interesting by suggesting that it might be responsible for global warming, feel free to make use of the post which has been produced. And note that a Creative Commons zero licence (currently in beta) has been assigned to this resource, so you don’t need to cite the original source. Let’s be part of an underground movement :-)
The first live streaming of talks at a IWMW event took place at IWMW 2006, when we experimented with an in-house streaming service and use of the Access Grid. The following year live streaming of the plenary talks was provided by staff at the University of York, and recordings of most of the talks were subsequently made available on Google Video.
On both occasions the numbers of people watching the live streaming video was low, with the maximum numbers of viewers being less than 20 at each of the events. Despite the low numbers we felt the service was valuable as it provided us with an opportunity to gain experience of not only various streaming technologies but also, and more importantly, the non-technical aspects of live streaming at events such as privacy, copyright, accessibility, etc.
This year’s IWMW 2008 event was held in the King’s Conference Centre at the University of Aberdeen. I was not the only delegate who was impressed by the King’s Auditorium - as one person commented on the event evaluation form “Conference hall had great facilities and microphones meant that you could hear delegates questions“.
The venue also had an excellent AV facilities, and we were pleased that, once again, we were able to stream the plenary talks. The quality of the video was excellent, as you can see if you watch any of the videos of the talks.
For that to happen, though, there will be a need to establish the business case for providing the streaming service, ensure that it is easy to use and ensure that the risks are being addressed.
The business case is interesting. Who should pay for the costs of providing a video streaming service for an event? Should the costs be taken from the participants who attend the event? Or should remote viewers who wish to access the video stream have to pay? Or perhaps event organisers should be looking for commercial sponsorship to cover the costs (although in light of the current economic turbulence, now is probably not a good time to suggest this). I wonder, though, whether the costs be covered by the host institution. Once the AV equipment has been installed, can the support costs be included i the rental of the facilities - just as we are now starting to expect access to WiFi network being provided as standard.
Once the business case has been sorted, there will be a need to ensure that the service is easy to use (back at IWMW 2006 people wishing to view the streaming video service needed to install “Real Player and the Xiph Player Plugin or Windows Media Player with the illiminable Ogg Directshow Filters for Speex, Vorbis, Theora and FLAC, with Linux users needing MPlayer with Ogg Theora“). Nowadays users shouldn’t need to concern themselves with details of the technologies, as use of Flash seems to provide the interface to streaming services (although there may be issues about versions of Flash). However I suspect there will be a need to provide a back channel, to enable the remote participants to discuss the talks. There will also be a need for the remote participants to join in discussions with the local audience, especially if a WiFi network is available. There will be a need, therefore, to ensure that the back channel is not tightly coupled to the video streaming service.
Finally there will be a need to address the risks. This will include addressing issues such as privacy, copyright and data protection. In addition there will be a need to consider the quality of service and reliability of the streaming service, especially if the costs in providing the service have been made transparent.
And the more I think about such issues the more I wonder whether live streaming at conferences has reached a tipping point. Might it simply be too much effort to provide on a regular basis?
