Some brainstorming ideas… some not entirely thought out.:)

It seems there are two main areas of concentration: content and systems. Ketan and I had discussed making the proceedings available on the mmsys website before and during the conference (via password protected pages). We had also planned on making a discussion page / forum per paper to allow discussion regarding each paper. The goal was to create an archive where future multimedia systems researchers could get up to speed on a particular paper / area. What we want to ensure in the long run is that the mmsys website is used as an integral part of research, rather than a historical artifact.

Given this basis, how can we make the conference experience richer with a conference server. I think it would be great if we had an area to post slides, images, and video. Perhaps, it would be best in terms of brainstorming to start throwing ideas out for what the conference server might look like and iterate based upon what people think they need out of such a system. So here are three possibilities:

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a) No local conference server – use a forum on the MMSys site that allows people to download the paper, presenters to upload their papers, and discussions to be had. Our work would mostly be to make sure that the content is available on the server from speakers and such.

Advantages: simple, minimal dev.

Disadvantages: bandwidth could be a serious problem with richer content; it may be kind of clunky; may be difficult to do access control across a bunch of different services

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b) Local conference server – have a local conference server with all of (a) with the ability of folks to add any type of content (images, presentations, video). From the tweeting side, it might also be useful to organize people into random discussions that are occurring, dinner outings, etc.

Advantages: Let’s us control all the content

Disadvantages: work.:); it may be kind of clunky given that we’d probably have less polished interfaces

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c) Local conference server – make the conference server a more integral part of the conference experience. In addition to the content in (b), we could work ahead of time to have people with interesting systems, etc to upload video demos on the conference server. You could also imagine having a lot of virtual tour type stuff of Scottsdale already filtered and organized so that attendees wouldn’t have to search all over googleland to enrich their conference experience.

Advantages: Big plus for attendees

Disadvantages: Lots of work

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Some caveats:

*) Somehow we will need to ensure presenters don’t get dumped on while they are presenting… perhaps moderating somehow needs to be enabled.

*) We might have issues with people being video recorded. Larry, thoughts on the video recording?

Some other things to get started:

*) Do people have favorite systems (parts of systems) out there for blogging / social interaction?

*) Do people have favorite systems for capture / playback of video that we could create locally at MMSys?

I can probably get a graduate student to do some work on this. I am also willing to contribute my time since I’m somewhat vested in ensuring MMSys survives (and thrives).