Agenda for our first conference call?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jeff Conklin on April 21, 2008 at 23:48

Just in terms of shared display, I'm a subscriber to GoToMeeting, a web conferencing service that allows up to 16 people total (at my subscription level) to share applications. Works with both Macs and PCs (and the Beta version I'm using supports Macs as presenters as well), and performance is excellent with Compendium. Firewalls can be a barrier for some users, but no more than any other tool. I can make anyone the presenter at any point, and can even give everyone the ability to grab the mouse and point at something on the presenter's screen (to be used sparingly!). I'd recommend that as the shared display medium, and we can arm wrestle over who among us will do the mapping. I like Simon's idea of having a place where we can input contributions and references, but I suggest it be a parallel medium for optional and back channel use.

Jeff

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by David Price on April 22, 2008 at 0:59

GoToMeeting looks ideal: thank you Jeff.

Would it be simpler and/or more reliable to use GoToMeeting for the conference call element as well rather than trying to run Skype in parallel?

I am very happy to be guided by your view on this.

David

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff Conklin on April 23, 2008 at 6:41

Here are the coordinates for the GoToMeeting shared desktop portion of our session. I will open the GTM space 10 minutes before the call starts -- please allow at least 5 minutes for your computer to download and install the GTM client before the call begins.

Here is the link for the video:
1. Click here to join: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/319697593

2. We will use Skype for the audio. David will coordinate that part (I hope).

Please note that since we will be using VoIP for the call it is important for most of us to conserve bandwidth in order to have clear, ungarbled audio. I find that I need to turn off email and any other services that might compete for bandwidth. It may also be necessary to speak a bit more slowly than usual

PS David and I did an experiment this morning using the built in VoIP service in GTM, and it seemed good enough that we agreed to try to use it for this conference call. However, later in the day I had a call with Tim van Gelder and we tried both GTM and Skype and found that the quality was considerably higher on Skype. So I recommend that we use Skype for our session audio.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jeff Conklin on April 23, 2008 at 6:49

One thing I would like to see on the agenda for the call is to hear from each person a brief statement of what they think is the biggest challenge or barrier to the successful early use of human-centred computing for climate change deliberation. What makes it hard? What makes you think that a few sharp Google engineers couldn't knock out a scalable deliberation tool before summer if they decided to take it on?

Come to think of it, we could even get started before the call and post our challenge statement here. And I'll suggest that if you post something here then you get to use your turn on the call to elaborate on your statement.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jack Park on April 23, 2008 at 16:41

I do happen to have a comment that I was thinking about while deep in an Interferon-driven delirium last night: few people outside this tight-knit tribe have much interest in doing anything other than just tossing up yet another instance of Drupal or other wiki-like facility and figure they're going to save the planet with all the collaboration that will facilitate. Witness Ning (this platform). It's the best the inventor of Netscape could come up with, and it's just another semi-threaded talking heads platform. My view of this problem is the same as my view of topic mapping: nobody is going to "get it" unless and until an earth-shaking demonstration is already in place and people can actually palpate the value. Compendium alone won't do that. DebateGraph alone won't do that. It's going to take a demonstration of something that seamlessly federates (without need for google searching on whatever grabs your interest) the entire entailment mesh to the greatest degree possible of some issue.

I also suspect that Google could, indeed, ape us and build such a demo. What's wrong with that picture? The need to monetize the work product of the gift economy that will make it work. It's going to take an enormous number of contributors, few if any will be paid, and that, I think, is the problem that remains to be solved if Google is to prevail. The knowledge base, at the very least, should be in a public domain foundation, not owned by any for-profit organism.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Jack Park on April 23, 2008 at 18:15

This URL was passed along to the global energy list by Jerry. Might be of interest to this tribe as well:
http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/docs00s/stella.php#mult

Odd comment: I don't yet see how we can discuss climate without also discussing energy, food, ... at the same time.

• ▶ Reply

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• Next ›
• Page