Re: Workshop and meeting requirements

On May 16, 2014, at 16:11 , Sylvain Galineau <galineau@adobe.com> wrote:

> 
> On May 16, 2014, at 2:55 AM, David Singer <singer@mac.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On May 15, 2014, at 21:55 , Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH) <Michael.Champion@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>> proper teleconferencing hardware.  VIDEO conferencing, with screensharing
>>> 
>>> All this sounds good, but I wonder about affordability: What kind of capital investment, bandwidth requirement,  and on-side manpower requirements are we talking about to do a TPAC-size meeting with proper A/V? 
>>> 
>> 
>> My experience is that video is expensive to do well and adds marginal value for remote participants.  A video of someone on a stage talking to his slides is simply not compelling.  
>> If one could get immersive 3D surround video of the entire meeting, maybe it would be better, you’d have the sense of the audience and so on.  But…
> 
> I do not think it is fair to dismiss video by comparing some ideal utopian solution with the worst possible alternative, especially when the latter, as described, is in fact significantly worse than what is routinely used by many of us today. I routinely attend remote presentations using software that lets me see the speaker's slides or desktop on most of my screen, video in the corner and a chat area allowing me to interact with everyone in the room. It works very well, even with audiences spread across remote locations. This would at the very least suggest a wide spectrum of possible options and outcomes.

I am not disputing the value of the chat (which we have), or the slides (which we have, and I have suggested we make it much easier to sync slides with the presenter, for participants), or a shared editing area (I just found that the W3C has http://pad.w3c.br, at least I assume that’s the W3C, and it’s great).  I would like to see what it would take to have an integrated ‘meeting page’ that frames these, along with say the Wiki of the group, tracker, bugzilla, and so on (maybe each group could make a data-driven table of what’s useful in their calls and meetings?), and so on.

But none of these involve video per se (and sending screen images as video can be deadly), and setting up a video camera, and selecting something to relay that is worth seeing, is hard, and the bandwidth use can be significant; and often it seems that all you get is a video of someone talking, at the end of it.

> 
> (Also note that a lot of W3C meeting work does not involve people presenting slides on a stage).
> 
>> 
>> I think there is a lot more lower-hanging fruit than video.
> 
> I think that is true as well, but it does not mean that video should be considered in a mutually exclusive way. We need better tools, one of which is video.

OK, I’m not opposed to working on video, I just want to see us deal with the higher pay-off lower-work ‘fruit’ first.

Dave Singer

singer@mac.com

Received on Friday, 16 May 2014 14:20:17 UTC