Blending meeting presentations with virtual community activity

Rich Apodaca made the suggestion to me that we should consider making presentations available from our face-to-face community of practice activities to the virtual.  We have actually taken this approach with eCheminfo and InnovationWell and both with virtual conferences and face-to-face meetings since we started the communities late 2003.  And I currently have a headache to solve - how can I combine such material into a useful community resource archive?

Another problem I have had is the level of effort required for such activity.  Technically we can do it but it takes time and resources.  Plus there is then editing and review.  And on top of that, there are all the complications on varying permissions that different participants may have for you.  At last's years Autumn meetings I just pulled back and went for the simpler solution of pdf file sharing through a wiki, as I could not deal with adding additional workload at that time.  Plus this kind of knowledge-sharing is usually mainly a cost rather than a revenue stream that can pay for the effort, and although there could be some possibilities there, it is not a major motivation for me to be spending my time on such a direction.

But tools are getting better and I am on the look out for what could be a better solution.  File sharing tools like box, video-sharing tools like youtube, widgets linking your presentations into LinkedIn or a Wetpaint wiki are all getting more user friendly.  But like U2's Bono I have not yet quite found what I am looking for.  Perhaps people have some suggestions to make?  Let me try some requirements for the solution:

- has content management and workflows for the content

- has self service for group members with permissions and review

- handles files, audio, video

- easy-to use live and playback multimedia editing and upload

- effective search over content including multimedia

- supports vocabulary, tagging

- works for variety of situations including face-to-face, virtual and blended

- supports user registration and profiles

- affordable

- usable

- Open Source would be nice

- interoperable with other collaboration and Web 2.0 tools so we can maintain context

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- And for the specific eCheminfo context, also adding interoperable cheminformatics capability would be very nice!

I recently posted some related thoughts on Context, Google Wave and Colayer on the Ferryman.

Welcome your suggestions!

Comments

[Rich Apodaca]

Barry, thanks for the response. It sounds like you've already been recording presentations and just need a good way to package and distribute them - no?

There are many possibilities. The best technology might be off-the-shelf or something simple and built around your particular needs. Web frameworks like Ruby on Rails make it much easier than it has been in the past to create a custom solution, or at least a working prototype.

If you're looking for more inspiration, you might check out Confreaks:

http://confreaks.com/events

They go around to various technical conferences (mostly in the Ruby community), record the talks, and make them publicly viewable.

IMO, the thing that really makes this work is that there's no registration needed - just go to the site and watch. Others can even embed the videos in their own sites, blogs, etc., which is a powerful way to get new ideas to spread. With a carefully crafted intro screen on each video, you'd be able to get out the message that there's an organization behind this making it happen and here's how you can be there in person next time, etc. This might not be possible with your content - I'm not sure.

Just some ideas. Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to kick some more around.