HEAD Conference Day 1
Friday, October 24th, 2008
THIS IS ALL WRITTEN FROM MY PERSPECTIVE AS SOMEONE ATTENDING FROM MY HOUSE WITH FIOS BANDWIDTH SO I AM SURE EXPERIENCES VARY IF YOU WERE AT A HUB
So I just wrapped up my first day of the <HEAD> Conference. I really really think an online conference is a great concept and I think for breaking a lot of ground, <HEAD> is doing great. That being said, there are many many many things that I would improve from the speakers, the organizers and the software perspective.
The Speakers
I pretty much watched all speeches for at least a little while and the ones where the speaker directly addressed the web cam were so much better then the speakers who were speaking at hubs. They were easier to hear, they seemed less distracted and they were more intune with any issues then the hub speakers. Ironically I think the speakers who addressed the web cams directly would probably be percieved as less professional speakers as they didn’t have these set out agenda like speeches, they instead were having an interactive conversation.
One suggestion would be if you were going to speak at an hub and weren’t going to be infront of a screen, you should have at least one person in your audience who is monitoring the online conference. Keep in mind this is SUPPOSSED to be an online conference, if you had to put a priority, in my mind <HEAD> was advertised as a “stay home attend a conference thing” so the online people should be first. One speaker unfortunately gave his whole speech with no sound for anyone online and because he was speaking to a room also he didn’t check the screen where we were all saying “noone can hear you!”
The speakers should have familiarized themself with the system before hand, of course I am not sure if this was a problem from the organizers if they didn’t give them access, but the audience seemed to know more then the speakers and ended up telling the speakers what they needed to do (”Don’t forget to hit record”, “click over there to start”. There was an issue with the speakers could change the slides on their screen but it wouldn’t change their slides to the viewers… some speakers were fortunate enough to have slide numbers, but even them calling them out was annoying and some speakers it was really just a description (”the slide with the picture of the boy”).
Also randomly some speakers just decided to start early (randomly 15 minutes before) because they figured it was being recorded and I dunno, maybe they had something else to do… yes we aren’t face to face, but I don’t want to get into a speech 1/2 way through and I planned on this time to watch these speeches, not another day.
The Organizers
I think I have the most problem with the organization, and I don’t mean a problem with the people, but I mean I have had the most problems literally.
The schedule was messed up time wise… something with the translation from GMT to the multiple time zones. I had speeches on the schedule to go at the same time, but the speakers speaking at two different times and both were thinking they were on the right time. This is HUGE if you actually wanted people to actually attend. I enjoyed actually participating and watching the chat logs as the presentation went on. Honestly if I just wanted to watch the videos later I would be out playing video games and hanging out with my family on Friday night/weekend.
There was no like general chat area, so therefore there was general chat questions all through out the speakers chats. Infact the other “meetup” options for online people were Second Life and Qik.. which don’t get me wrong, the Second Life looks awesome, but on my laptop that isn’t something that I can easily switch to and from the browser presentations. I would have loved to have seen some Campfire esque chat (hell even IRC) or even another room that just was announcements or something. The other options of things like Qik is cool too… IF you happen to have a phone that uses that. I would have loved to have seen a more lifestreaming approach to <HEAD> and people could add in whatever content they wanted from whatever site (someone did put together a FriendFeed room, but since it wasn’t official it got the support of all of 7 people).
There needed to be a tutorial video for the conference UI. There is a lot of functionality like muting people, coming out of full screen, applause, etc that you just needed to play around with to find. There was a lot of “customer service” going onto new users through out the talks.
The titles of the presentations and the speakers weren’t updated on the speeches so if you switched between multiple browsers you really had no clue who was who unless you recognized a face.
There was no ticketing system so even with all these problems/requests I had no place to complain… complaining puts me at ease… hence this blog post.
The Software
I am not sure if the software (Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro) problems I have are because of incorrect use, workflow/setup bugs or just bad design.
- UI is fixed size and couldn’t resize to take advantage of my screen
- Mute sometimes just stops muting
- Chat window was only three lines if slides were on
- No way to flag questions so that they don’t get lost in the seas of chatter
- Need to be able to create groups so you can chat with your friends/collegues inside chat without it being everyone or to a specific person at a time
- When speakers ask questions like “how many people X” there should be a raise hand feature… not a sea of “yeses” in the crowd filling up
It’s Still Well Worth It!
After all this is said and done… I think the conference is still worth the 99 bucks I paid and I hope to see many more function this way in the future… I think most of these things are just growing pains. The feeling I get from <HEAD> is not that the people are lazy or that the software is bad, it is just noone really knows what to expect and it is cutting teeth in a lot of areas.
