This posting opens the discussion about the proposal Ramesh Jain and I discussed at ACM Multimedia 2009 in Beijing. The problem we discussed was the difficulty of enhancing the conference attendance experience, producing live feeds from a conference that can be viewed remotely, and capturing artifacts from a conference for historical access.
The background to the idea goes back to producing live webcasts from conference presentations and the effect that Twitter and Facebook are having. At MM09, Ramesh and I lamented that we could not easily access material from the conference through our smart phones and laptops. For example, we could access the electronic proceedings but we couldn’t access slides from the various talks nor could we easily share pictures that different people took at the conference. Moreover, some of us created Facebook (FB) tweets during the conference but the only people who saw them were “our friends.”
We discussed many ways to attack these problems, but eventually came up with the idea of setting up a server at the conference site with interfaces that allowed people to generate FB-like feeds and post slides, photos, and videos. The idea was that any presenter could post his or her slides before or after the presentation, anyone could post photos, and we would have a blog for discussions about the various papers and sessions. We also discussed the possibility of making the server available to people who are not at the conference – probably if they are SIGMM members.
Then, after the conference, the idea is to take the server back home and upload the content to the SIGMM website as a document of the conference. The presentations and blogs could be linked to the papers in the ACM DL and the photos could be linked to various event descriptions.
Eventually we’d like to capture more media live (e.g., audio, video, and rgb (for slides and demos)) and webcast it, but for now, doing something limited would provide a convenient way for people to communicate and contribute material to the conference archive and make it easier for people to access that material.
We think this approach would be much better than having someone collect material and post it after the fact. In fact, if the server software was developed appropriately, you could sync it to the SIGMM website as the conference happens. The only issue is network bandwidth to the conference site.
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I really like the idea!
ReplyDeleteThe first thing that came to my mind though was: What part of it is already supported by services like Facebook, what parts of it could be implemented as a plugin, and also is there anything that is not possible with Facebook or similar services.
My first shot on doing this with Facebook would be:
- Create a group that features all conference participants
- Ask them to upload all slides and other presentation material, either in advance or right after the presentation.
- Then people can comment and link to presentations in any way they want and use different facebook apps on them as well.
So is there really a need for a new technology or dedicated server at the conference?
Gerald - FB would work, but how much bandwidth is needed to allow a subset of 150 people to be updating and downloading content. I just worry that most conference sites won't have the b/w.
ReplyDeleteAnd, how easy is it for us to programmatically take material out of FB and put it elsewhere?
And, suppose we wanted to limit access to the conference server to SIGMM members after the conference? We can't create accounts in FB for all SIGMM members.
Regarding the bandwidth: I agree. That could be a problem. But I don't see a solution apart from either not using a lot of bandwidth or checking site by site.
ReplyDeleteRegarding interfacing Facebook: Games like Mafiawars for example access all kinds of information in Facebook. So there must be an API. It might be a problem with their terms of service to export and not only use this information but I don't know.
Regarding the accounts for all SIGMM members: I think that's exactly what we can do. One creates a group "SIGMM" that can only be joined as a SIGMM member. There are all kinds of restricted groups. For example, IEEE CS has a group that can only be joined with a @computer.org email address.