Remote Participation in a Box

Lots and lots of notes about this, but the problem is this:

How can we enhance participation in sessions at events like BarCamp or MashPit for remote and local attendees?

Participants (from the original page .. which original page?)

  • Chris Messina
  • Adam Keys
  • Christopher St. John

Next Steps (Bar Camp Austin anyone?)

  • Synchronization of an IRC channel and a video stream for a single session in a unified interface is what you need for a nice playback mechanism, and would support the kind of modified-time-playback that was discussed. Plus we've got that data from Bar Camp Dallas, and I suspect a couple of other places. Adding a voting mechanism (simple "that's cool/interesting/controversial" button maybe, it could even be a gesture in the irc channel) would show the integration of another stream with the first two, and would probably be fun enough to get people's attention and make the tool fun for use at the conference as well as afterwards.
  • Clarify the minimum-required-to-declare-victory. There is a great vision to be worked towards, but there's no hope of completing it in any short period of time, certainly not for Bar Camp Austin. Is there some subset that demonstrates the essence and is both useful and inspirational? (and, secondarily, do-able) I kinda like video + irc in a central control panel with a clear path to a pluggable architecture demonstrated by synchronization with a voting stream and a proof-of-concept time-dilation-according-to-comment-density video viewing mode. By y'know, there are lots of possibilities.
  • User interface mockup. From the mashpit, there seemed to be general agreement on a browser-based dashboard with a single page overview of a particular session as the focus. The video window naturally dominates, but may not be available all the time. Some part of the page would have a DiggSpy-like view of the chat (or of all text-based events?) http://www.digg.com/spy with other parts of the screen giving things like general info on the session, a presenter bio, contributed links, etc, etc.

Actual Work

  • Got a quick and dirty proof-of-concept for javascript controlling the playback of a quicktime movie in firefox. Running from a local file instead of a stream, but the api allows extracting out timestamps as well as jumping to a particular timestamp and controlling playback speed, so the basics are there.
  • In the middle of taking apart DiggSpy
  • Next up is parsing chat logs in javascript in the browser itself, on the assumption that the first step will be a read-only syncrhonized presentation of the logs with the video. Very fuzzy on how to get live logs into the browser without server-side support, but the static logs seem like a nice first step.
  • After that, want to try to get the bar camp dallas video and chat logs together so that they play back synchronized, just as a proof-of-concept for the back-end technology. Getting a little ahead of the user experience, but these techno-bits are clearly required so I think it's ok to experiment.

Brainstorming

When you're present

  • wayfinding/navigating an event
  • tell me what i missed (at other sessions)
  • continuity (remote/in person)
  • conversations in the hall
  • commitment

When you're remote

  • What you've got
    • cell phone
    • Skype
    • internet
    • blog
    • wiki
    • flickr
    • aggregator
    • technorati
  • Things you can do
    • peripheral vision of event
    • learn how to do your own event
    • watch presentations
    • ask questions
    • participate
      • voice
      • IM/IRC
      • wiki
    • gardening
    • ask questions
    • maintain content
    • tag photos
    • annotate video
    • transcription
    • present
    • research/help present
    • make connections

Notes

  • Voting up/down is a little tricky, I think you get most of the benefit from a "this is interesting" button without the possible negativity
  • It can't be "the presenter against the world", the audience needs to take a risk in proportion to the risk by the presenter. Somebody suggested a way to moderate up/down participants in the backchannel, which seemed to make things more fair.
  • It may be implicit, but a general principle is to re-use existing services in preference to re-writing them
  • Another general principle that's probably implicit but worth repeating: leave things where they belong, the "event record" should for the most part be a great big index pointing out onto the web, not a huge media file
  • http://artofsystems.blogspot.com/2006/01/barspy.html
  • Stretched/Compressed time playback based on comment streams
  • Quotes page with actual audio/video clips
  • If the initial focus is on local attendees and after-the-event viewers, can probably ignore some potentially tricky synchronization issues. Two possible outcomes: it turns out that the synchronization issues really weren't all that bad, and we're done, or it turns out that remote attendees get a crappy experience and have to wait for rev b, but we now have good data on what the problems are instead of having to speculate.
  • The goal is not to replicate exactly the experience of being at the conference for remote or time-shifted participants, but rather to enable those participants to contribute in appropriate ways. For example, time-shifted participants can be encouraged to garden the data streams, and remote attendees are probably in a better position to do active research during a presentation. Or something like that.
  • Having no central server whatsoever would be very cool. How little is it possible to get away with?

Questions

  • What is the role of remote participants?
  • How can they help?
  • How do we make it worth their while?

References

Potentially Similiar Things

None of this stuff is new, the cool thing isn't the idea, it's the fact that there's a built-in audience at upcoming bar camps and the potential for a quick but still very useful implemention:


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