[LINK] Forum on high speed bandwidth in Australia

Jan Whitaker jwhit at melbpc.org.au
Thu May 7 10:56:19 AEST 2009


At 12:55 AM 7/05/2009, Pia Waugh wrote:
>Write once publish everyone is a fantastic way to
>cross different platforms and keep everyone in the loop, but it will
>certainly require a lot more planning and work to get to that. I see this as
>ultimately a community project as it will take a lot of different inputs
>aand ideas to get it right.

Pia, this is something I hadn't planned on attending, but I'm hooked. 
I even watched the twitter feed and was tempted to subscribe so I 
could answer some of the points being made about the Canadian 
Transport advisory. Then TomW said it for me: Melbourne has a 
terrific 'how to get from A to Z' on the Metlink website. Not sure 
how it works on a mobile or PDA

Your first attempts in this has been above average, despite the few 
hiccups. I found that when firefox decides to run its autosave 
routine, I lost too much memory in my laptop and lost the feed, so I 
had to reboot Quicktime. That's a quirk on my end that your side 
can't control of course. But it wouldn't surprise me if once this got 
a wider audience instead of the geeks amongst us, there will be those 
sorts of issues that are possibly going to affect the perception of 
the programs. Fixing the echo when requested was really good and 
responsive practice during the session.

I also liked the few bits of camera changes to mix up the visuals. 
Not professional studio level, but appropriate for a somewhat more 
informal production. I think that is a good thing and makes the 
communication more real than over-produced. This is NOT 
Television(TM). So good job on that.

I found myself going back and forth between the webpage/blog [which 
no one seems to be using for comments during the session, assuming 
I'm in the right place (the PublicSphere page with the program on 
it)], the audio/video stream and twitter. Then someone piped up about 
adding an IRC chat! Whew! I'm a pretty good multi-tasker, but I think 
I missed quite a bit of the streaming because of my attention being 
pulled away from the presentation to read the other channels. What 
that means for sessions that have 'real', as in high-import, topics 
-- eg community planning, etc. -- is that people could miss key facts 
or ideas because of the wavering attention to the 'main game'. Just 
something to put in your thinking about the next program. Like 
appropriate use, there is potentially appropriate channel numbers, 
depending on what you want the participants to do. Truthfully, the 
human brain can only attend fully and well to one verbal channel at a 
time for the best cognition of what is being communicated. Visuals 
and audio and words are a different matter if they are designed to go 
together, but add a totally different content stream and there is 
high probability of cognitive dissonance. [psychology jargon, sorry]

Hope your tech folks are keeping stats on number of viewers somehow. 
Twitter isn't probably the best indicator.

Congratulations to you and the team on your first venture!

Jan
[whose managed a few videoconferences in her day --- it is NOT easy, folks]


Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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