[LINK] Forum on high speed bandwidth in Australia

[Pia Waugh]

Hi Jan,

<quote who="Jan Whitaker">

> 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

I'm glad it was so interesting for you and thank you for all the feedback.
Would you mind re-posting your feedback on a new blog post specifically
dealing with feedback about the format of the first public sphere event?
 
  http://www.katelundy.com.au/2009/05/07/the-right-recipe-for-the-public-sphere/#comment-118

I'll be collating Tweets and blogs related to the event and posting links
on the blog so the data can all be easily found. I wouldn't want to repost
from this list obviously without permission, but there have been a lot of
great ideas from this list, and we would really appreciate your thoughts on
the event format on the blog post above.

<snip>
> 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.

George did an exceptional job, as did Bob Edwards. It was an amazing group
effort, especially all the contributions from people in the crowd and
online. Craig Thomler live-blogged the entire event so even though we may
not have the recording, it gives a great overview of the content covered on
the day:

  http://egovau.blogspot.com/2009/05/liveblog-of-publicsphere-1-high.html

I will be posting the lessons I learnt probably tomorrow (need sleep!) but
things like more regular breaks, more time for discussion on topics (and how
to do that effectively across multiple mediums), ensuring there is time for
more testing prior to events, and splitting my role in the day across a
couple of people (blogging the topics, tracking questions, slide and
pre-recorded video for speakers, and also trying to engage in the discussion
myself was all a bit much :).

> 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 

Yeah, I think what we need is a way to aggregate/collate input from
different mediums so there is one place to look. Is worth some thought, and
ideas welcome. I don't mean a single tool that does it all, but a way to
aggregate data from blogs, comments, twitter (and other similar systems),
irc, email, etc. I'm going to be thinking about this pretty hard, but it
seems like a pretty useful tool.

> 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]

I totally agree, this is something we'll likely need a little more
experimentation to get right, but there is the need to balance making it
easy to contribute in any format (and easy to engage in cross posting, cross
conversations that doesn't interrupt flow but is also captured) and the
human brain's capacity to engage in a high quality fashion without massive
cognitive dissonance. I'm assuming different people have different tolerance
for different data streams (just based on my own experience), but if it is
collated together, that'd make it a little easier.. the question is how to
balance and scale overwhelming linear feeds with the diverse synchronous
communications in this medium. Just a short braindump :)
 
> Hope your tech folks are keeping stats on number of viewers somehow. 
> Twitter isn't probably the best indicator.

We'll post all stats on the blog comments in the coming day or two.
 
> Congratulations to you and the team on your first venture!

Thanks! Congratulations to everyone who contributed!

Cheers,
Pia

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