I am currently teaching a Web Programming course and one of the students is a Journalism major / CS minor. I had previously agreed to advise him for some independent study credits next semester. I am going to see whether or not he would be interested in contributing to this effort as part of that indep. study, as I am meeting with him tomorrow. Will report on that tomorrow as well as respond to Wu-Chi's comments about different directions that we might go.
Having thought about it for the last few days, I think that having a local conference server is not going to be particularly helpful. In the end, we will want to move all of the content on to something more archival anyway, so having a server on-site doesn't really help us much unless we think that bandwidth to an off-site server is going to really be that bad. I think much of that problem can be mitigated by limiting rich content (at least at first) to just audio of the presentations, slides, and photos that people want to upload.
Content is going to be key. I think Wu-Chi's option C where we invest in getting good content on the site in advance as well as during the conference will have the most impact. Participant-added content is probably going to be pretty minimal and probably limited to a few discussion posts on a few papers. We may be able to get some key participants who are interested to add a lot of content, but those are probably going to be just a handful. I would suggest that we recruit one or two "editors" who are charged with finding interesting related content (local information, related papers, related conferences, etc.) and drawing it in. Hiring a student or two to do this for maybe 3-4 weeks worth of part-time work might be the way to do that.
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Can we find out now what the bandwidth is at the conference venue? I'm really worried that if we have 50-100 people posting pictures it will overwhelm the link.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I don't think audio/video is worth pursuing at this time. Pictures, copies of slides, discussions, and maybe short videos are the material people want access to.
ReplyDelete@Gerald - I don't think we should use Facebook, even though I like their editing and organizing interfaces, because we will not be able to access the material as easily after the fact.