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

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

--

Nancy Baym wrote:

Paid AoIR members have been able to access all of the papers that authors have sent us that were presented at the AoIR conferences via the members section of the website since 2000. That's text -- lots and lots of text direct from the conferences to you for a modest membership fee (adjusted downward for students and residents of non-OECD countries).

What about papers from the conference that just took place? Are those papers online yet? How can they be accessed by people who attended the conference but are not AoIR members? Thanks, Scott ----- Scott A. Golder golder@media.mit.edu http://www.media.mit.edu/~golder 617.877.9230

Nancy Baym wrote:

The archives are only available to AoIR members. Access to the archives is a benefit of membership, not a component of conference registration. For information on becoming a member, visit the URL at the very end of this message. We realize that people who attend a conference but are not members are sometimes disgruntled with this. However, the archives include all five conferences we have had, not just the most recent one, and the membership fees are low and include a variety of discounts on journal subscriptions and books as well as archive access.

I understand why multi-year archives are accessible to members only; after all, AoIR is an organization that costs money to run and maintain. However, I'd suggest that the reason conference attendees have been disgruntled, is that AoIR's practice is wrong. In my understanding of how these things work (and I may be incorrect), when people pay to go to a conference, they are paying for access to the materials that are presented there. This includes not only the live sessions, but also the papers from those sessions (either digitally or hard copy). Is this something that maybe varies by discipline? Granted, if an attendee really wants a particular paper, it's pretty easy to email the author for a copy, but this prevents casually browsing through the papers. I'm curious, what is the rationale behind the decision to not make papers available to the attendees of the conferences in which they were presented? Scott ----- Scott A. Golder golder@media.mit.edu http://www.media.mit.edu/~golder 617.877.9230

I'm curious, what is the rationale behind the decision to not make papers available to the attendees of the conferences in which they were presented?

Brief versions: - the decision to make sure there are benefits of paid membership and hence incentives for joining AoIR other than the altruistic motivation of wanting to do one's part to sustain a network one finds valuable - creating a single password system for members that allows access to all archives and other member-only material is considerably less burdunsome than a separate set of passwords for attendees of each conference for each separate conference archive. Again the reminder you're no doubt sick of my repeating is that we are only able to do as much as our members are willing to do, and creating and maintaining multi-level web sites and password systems are not high priorities. -- the cost of membership is less than the difference between conference registration for members and nonmembers, so unless registration fees are covered by one's institution but membership isn't, there is little incentive not to become a member before registering anyway. I will say also that in 5 years of doing it this way, we've heard about 3 or 4 complaints. That's not to say others don't share your sentiment, I know some do. However, there does not seem to be a strong sentiment againt AoIR's position on this. I know many conferences sell cd-roms of the papers presented there at an additional cost rather than included with conference registration, so perhaps this is something that does vary across disciplines. It is always a challenge for AoIR to meet the expectations of so many disciplinary traditions with such varied ways of being normal. 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

Dear all: First I’d like to clarify that my suggestion of the “virtual conference” is meant only to bring in some new ideas for more participatory Aoir conferences; it is not a complaint at all. In fact I’m very grateful for all the things provided by Aoir and specifically the contributions made by people on this list. Aoir is one of the few academic groups that I participate and respect. As for my idea of something online simultaneously with a “real conference,” it is inspired by several conferences I attended in China and in this part of the world, where a seminar could be broadcasted online (not necessarily to be visual images, it could be text or sound) and received text-based response from audience. In the first annual conference of China’s Computer-mediated Communication Association last May in Najing, some seminars were broadcast through sina.com simultaneously to the national audience. As for costs, to attend a 3-day international conference (in the US or Europe) would normally cost me about HK16,000 (US$2,000) per trip (including registration fee, airfare, accommodation, etc), plus the time factor, over 40 hours on airplane, in airports and other vehicles in a return trip. I would rather pay half that money to some virtual conference technicians so that I can participate in a conference without traveling. Nowadays, we also have to take into consideration the threat of international terrorism. It is definitely no point for anyone to risk her/his life to go to some places which are always under terrorist attack alert just to attend some academic conferences. For who should do it? I definitely don’t suggest that we ourselves do it all the way as such work requires technical expertise and equipment. A couple of suggestions: 1. The most feasible way is to contract it out to a special virtual conference company and charge it to those who want to attend as virtual audience; 2. Whoever wants to organize a virtual seminar (virtual panel), be responsible for it themselves. Of course, virtual volunteers may be needed in the process. I am very interested in joining a team to exploring the potentials of a virtual conference. WM