In my opinion video is not necessari. In scientific context the important is "the text". All others is optyonally. Whith interaction ontime (IM) (coordination) and off time (forums+docs) (discussions) + Intranet is enouthg. ------------------------------------ jvives@cibersociedad.net COMITE TECNICO DEL CONGRESO congreso@cibersociedad.net II CONGRESO ONLINE DEL OBSERVATORIO PARA LA CIBERSOCIEDAD. 2-14 Noviembre 04 http://www.cibersociedad.net/Congreso2004 -------------------------------- Nancy Baym va dir:
Many people have posted links to evidence that virtual conferences can happen. How about telling us how much it cost to do them, how many people were actively involved in doing the work that made them happen, and how many people in the end took advantage of their being online to access them? What was the cost per virtual attendee and how was that cost covered?
At the very least, in order for it to happen you have to have:
Cameras and people to film all day in every room (or selected sessions if one scales down). We run 9 simultaneous sessions over three days. So we are talking about either hiring about 30 days worth of professional camera men or finding 30 days worth of volunteers to man the cameras. And someone is going to provide us those 9 cameras and all the film, right? If we had to pay just for this alone it would dramatically increase conference registration costs. And we'd then be hearing complaints about how we were disenfranchising potential attendees by making it too expensive.
Or else we charge to access it. Which requires password and registration systems. Who is going to create and manage that?
Someone to get all that material online. Again, this is something real people have to actually manage. Who is volunteering?
The technological and labor resources to stream or store it. Will you be doing that service for us?
As Jeremy has said repeatedly, if this is something you REALLY think AoIR should do then by all means, step up to provide the money to pay for it, and the labor to enact it. If you can't get it together in time for Chicago, take the long view and start planning now for how to do it in future years.
We are MEMBER driven. That does not mean that the members state what they want and a small group of volunteers spends enormous amounts of time to serve them. It means that when members want something to happen, those members have to make it happen and the executive committee will do our best to facilitate their efforts.
Please remember that not only is AoIR an all-volunteer association, it is a SMALL volunteer association. As President (a position for which I get no reduction in my real job duties and no compensation), my top concern is making sure that the things we can do are done as well as we can do them without bankrupting the association. There are many things we'd love to do that we can not afford to do either financially or in terms of labor.
I agree that the goal of having a virtual version of our event to accompany the face-to-face version is a good one. However, we cannot do it unless people who are not already among those few spending many hours every week to do the work for this association, recruit the people and funding it takes to make it happen.
Nancy
-- Nancy Baym http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym Communication Studies, University of Kansas Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org _______________________________________________ Air-l-aoir.org mailing list Air-l-aoir.org@listserv.aoir.org http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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