Taken for Granted

Yesterday I participated in an interesting experiment …. EETimes’ Virtual conference on Multicore. It was an interesting chance to catch up with the latest attempts at running a “conference” online. I recall attending and participating in a couple of these early in the decade – I gave a talk (a bit of a disaster if I recall rightly) at SoC online in 2002 – disaster due to logistics and the perhaps primitive state of the technology at that time.

My friend Frank Schirrmeister was a participant for Synopsys, a sponsor, and wrote several short pieces about it on his blog that relate his experience as a vendor rep and participant in a panel. He also inspired my title by saying that he was listening to Pink Floyd while chatting to people.

The technology has clearly moved on. This conference had 4 or 5 places you could be in – sometimes in multiple places at once. The good bits:

1. the “auditorium” where talks were given. I “saw” the keynote by Kunle Olukotun of Stanford. Good talk, and the technology was just like a webinar, with voice, slides, click to a bio of the speaker, and in theory a way to ask questions by typing, although the talk went long and there was no Q&A. Webinar technology is working pretty well these days and I’ve attended a few and given a couple.
2. the panels were OK, although my connection packed it in in the last one (I may have worn out my internet connection and entropy set in). One problem was it was difficult to figure out who was speaking if their accents were the same (luckily I knew some of the participants and some were easy to pick out). Another colleague, Steve Cox, suggested that it would be good to indicate who is speaking at any time. Perhaps have their pictures up and some kind of “flying fickle finger of fate” (I know, it shows my age) move around to indicate who is talking at what point, or highlight their picture.
3. I participated in two of the organised chat sessions a bit. Their were some interesting comments (but see below).
4. Although the numbers were suspect due to double counting, the list of participants in different parts of the virtual conference centre were useful to browse and find old friends and colleagues and set up a private chat or message interchange. I found several and chatted to a few. Turns out you could be in more than one place at once, as Frank also found. So even virtual conferences let you meet old friends! And at times there were way over 400 attendees, which seems pretty good.

Not so good bits:

1. There was a virtual tradeshow (exhibit floor) as part of the conference. About 8 vendors. You could pick up pdfs and watch video demonstrations and also “chat” to the exhibitor reps. The virtual coffee offered by the vendors was both vaporous and tasteless (if you haven’t figured that out …. it is a joke). Didn’t really work in many ways. One interesting bit was that you could join the chat and observe the interchange between other “attendees” and the reps.
2. The structured chats about specific topics could be confusing as they would turn into multiple dialogues and at times it was easy to lose the train of who was responding to who about what. Kind of like a multi threaded email list but without anything to mark the different threads. Perhaps the technology here could be improved to mark, maybe by colour coding, each new thread when it starts, and when people respond they could pick a colour/name to indicate what thread they are responding to. Would also help because people’s typing speed and connections introduce unexpected latency in response at times.
3. I missed out on the chance to create an avatar for myself at the show (maybe the instructions were in small print or I just skipped it when registering and then forgot to go back and try it). About 10-15% of people had avatars – usually cartoonish heads from somewhere. But Frank used a web site to take a photo and turn it into an avatar (see his blog here). Although he somehow managed to “de-age” a bit (the Benjamin Button effect?), it looked enough like him that this would be useful if everyone did it either with a photo or an avatar-ised photo. Perhaps this could be encouraged a little more forcefully in future events like this – photos might be even more useful than realistic avatars.
4. Of course, it is all too easy to try to do several things at once, and as a result, not really “attend” even when you are attending. Might be good to have a way to mark that your avatar or name is temporarily “sleeping” or on a “Call” of some kind when you have stepped away.

There are all small niggles. What I liked best about the event is that it happened. As we all know, the economic situation has caused reductions in attendance at events all over the world. Webinars have proven their value for many companies and been useful for those attending in giving them information. Experimenting with web technology to make events like this is both a good thing and a way of improving the technology. As long as we don’t always become virtual – both because meeting real human beings face to face is really important, and because so far, virtual coffee is really bad.

I just went back to the show link here, and I see a note saying access to the show will be available June 23, 2009 – so this may be an archive of the keynote and other talks, panels, etc. Check it out!