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 LITA Membership LITA Committees Top Technology Trends Committee Midwinter Meeting Report, Seattle 2007
DATE: 1/30/2007 CHAIR: Maurice York REPORTER: Maurice York CONFERENCE: Midwinter ATTENDEES: 5 CURRENT ACTIVITIES: This meeting of the committee occurred in the afternoon, following the discussion session with the trendsters in the morning. The main items on the committee agenda were a review of the format and composition of the panel session, the technologies we are using the introduce interactivity, and the post-conference activities of the committee. PANEL AND FORMAT The recent expansion of the pool of trendsters has been very successful in creating a more diverse panel in terms of makeup and background. The committee has been experimenting with various formats for the Midwinter meeting, which has ranged from large halls and panel-type format to small rooms and more of an open discussion format. The morning's session was in a small room with the trendsters and some committee members at a rectangular table in the middle of the room, with observers forming a circle around the outer edges of the room. This format promoted great discussion at the table and allowed observers to interact closely with the table, asking questions and making comments as the conversation developed. The first hour and a half or so was an open discussion on topics that trendsters volunteered to put on the table, concluding with a "lightning round" in which each trendster gave his or her top five trends in bullet-point format. This more intimate setting and open conversation received quite positive responses from all. A number of people noted a downside that the room was a bit small, with not enough chairs, so that spectators were fairly packed against each other standing and on the floor. The committee decided, based on feedback from the trendsters and spectators, that this would now be the favored format for Midwinter. TECHNOLOGIES The morning session introduced interactive technologies into the panel discussion for the first time. The use of technologies to bring in remote trendsters who do not have the opportunity to be at the panel in person has been a stated desire of both the panel and the committee for several conferences. in the run-up to the conference, we decided to attempt remote video chat and a live text chat session that would run parallel to the discussion, allowing the audience to post questions or comments on the discussion and those panelists who wished to respond . Jeremy Frumkin and Sarah Houghton-Jan volunteered to experiment with the remote video chat, via Skpe. For text chat, we used a Meebo chat room, which has a low bar of entry since it does not require pre-existing accounts or even creating accounts in order for people to post to it. The morning session allowed us to gain experience with these technologies, though there were not a few hiccups. Internet access did not arrive until about 40 minutes into the session, a Vista laptop that we were using for projecting the chat had a last minute video card seizure and required minor surgery, and Sarah had issues with connectivity on her end. The flash-based Meebo room was not resizable, so combined with the video driver problem it had poor visibility in that room. Jeremy remoted in by video successfully once the network was up, but there were intermittent problems with bandwidth that caused a number of drops in the call. The chat was useful for keeping Jeremy in the loop on the discussion during the call drops, and often when the call reconnected, since the mic setup did not pick up all of the conversation in the room (this was related to problems with the speaker amplification in the room itself). Despite the technology problems, the discussion was good, and we learned quite a bit about how to make this kind of interactivity more successful. The committee decided it was valuable enough to bring in remote participation that we should continue refining and perfecting it. The root of most of the problems was bad wireless, a failure on the part of the hotel to set up the room as requested, and differences in the live conference room environment that did not arise during testing (in much more controlled, high-bandwidth office contexts). The committee will take all of this information and use it for tweaking the technology setup. CONFERENCE FOLLOW-UP: Following up on discussions from the last year or so, the committee has been examining the value of creating the bibliographies that have generally followed the conference and provided resources on trends mentioned during the panel and discussions. We have been looking for more timely and interactive ways to provide post-conference discussion and content based on Top Tech Trends. Currently we are capturing audio through USB mics that we bring in and then posting podcasts to the LITA blog. The committee will continue shifting all of our current content and activity over to the blog, and leave the web site as an archive of past trends. Instead of the bibliographies, the committee will experiment with posting follow-up on the LITA blog and trying to generate conversation and direct people to resources through posts and comments on the blog. FUTURE ACTIVITIES:
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