Survey: Do You Use Videoconferencing?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 7.07
The Gorebashers are having a field day noting how much carbon is being emitted just getting everyone to the Bali conference, and perhaps they have a point. As April notes, there is some pretty slick technology out there that lets you bore people to death with powerpoint slides without having to fly all over the world to do it. Certainly flying is no fun these days between the security and the crowds, yet videoconferencing, unlike those airplanes, has not taken off.
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well i work at home and so does everyone else i work with. we don't do video conferencing because we don't want people to know we hang out in our pajamas all day
well i work at home and so does everyone else i work with. we don't do video conferencing because we don't want people to know we hang out in our pajamas all day
Most of my company's clients are municipalities, and they definitely don't have video conferencing capabilities. Other than that, we still do a good ol' teleconference ever so often.
Our company offers web based video conferencing. It's so simple to log in and start using this technology, and all you require is a web cam.
This technology makes so much sense, and can make a huge impact on our environment.
I would be happy to give anyone a demo, so you can see first hand. Also, please mention, you found our website through Tree Hugger, and we will extend a 25% discount on our services.
David Corcoran
1.416.849.8151
http://www.batipi.com
I am at New Mexico State University. We are involved in an international project involving the Ministry of Agriculture in Jordan, and so it is REALLY expensive to have face-to-face meetings. For one-on-one, we often use Skype video, or I will set up Skype video with a projector and a good digital camcorder (better optics and zoom than a USB webcam) for a conference room. My boss has a weekly Skype video call with his counterpart in Jordan. To accomodate the timezones, they call at about 6 or 7 am Mountain Time (late afternoon in Jordan, I think), and my boss makes his call from home.
Recently, we have started a similar project with the University of Tikrit. Our faculty definitely do not want to travel to Iraq, so we use a Polycom videoconference system, with Skype for backup.
More locally, our department had a cooperative extension project with chile growers and processors. Meetings were hard to schedule during harvest season, since nobody had time to spend a day traveling to the university for a few hours' meeting. We set up a multi-user PC-based videoconference system using iVisit. Their service provided up to eight simultaneous live video/audio feeds, giving our computer a Brady Bunch effect. It was hard to keep the system working, since our farmers and processors did not have computer maintenance as a high priority.
My boss has been a driving force behind promoting such distance communication as a routine practice. Regrettably, it has not caught on for most of the university. The more common practice is to set up webconferencing using CENTRA. This is a more top-down approach where one party delivers content to an audience, like a lecture format. It does let the audience give text and audio feedback, but that's not the same as the peer-to-peer approach that a planning meeting requires.