The Future Of Web Conferencing' – This online interview, carried out via email, was written by 'Robin Good', also known as Luigi Canali De Rossi. Luigi publishes extensively on communication technologies, and has interviewed several people in this series, including the famous 'Mr. Web Conferencing' David Woolley.
Research on the Management of Large Engineering Projects – Anne Anderson pointed out this reference to a study of 60 large scale engineering projects in several countries. The study tried to establish what factors led to the success or failure of the projects, and reached some fascinating conclusions: (paraphased below)
* Front-end engineering of institutional arrangements and strategic systems are much more important to the success of large engineering projects than project engineering and management. The presence of coherent and well-developed institutional arrangements is the most important factor in determining the success of a given project, and front-end planning generally is more important than engineering and management during implementation. For example, agreements among key parties that are drawn well in advance of detailed design are key to success.
* A long front-end and a “sprint to finish” once institutional arrangements are concluded seems to be ideal. A 70-30 rule (70 of elapsed time before design freeze, 30 percent in sprint to finish after freeze) applies to LEPs with lives of 15 years, just as it does to software projects with lives of one year.
These results are consistent with observations about the life cycles of distance research collaborations.
Posted on Charity Village October 2003
Web conferences can be defined as meetings of any size (from two people up to hundreds) that use the Internet to share information during the meeting.
Web conferences may include videoconferencing so that you can see the faces of the presenter and participants, or they may provide only data sharing. Data sharing may involve touring web pages together, watching a PowerPoint presentation, and/or sharing full applications such as co-editing a document.
Web conferences are often done in conjunction with teleconferences, so that the audio conversation uses regular telephones while the visual information uses the Internet. This ensures that the audio quality is good even for people with dialup Internet access.
Advantages of web conferences
Web conferences have many advantages over both teleconferences and face to face meetings:
How to make web conferences work
Web conferencing tools are still pretty complicated and usually expensive. They require access to an Internet connection and a telephone, and they need to be accompanied by a teleconferencing service, which adds to the cost. (However, see Groove, below.)
Most web conference services are based on Windows PCs and a recent version of a standard Web browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape. If you want to include Macintosh or Linux users, or people with very old systems, you may have difficulty. Ensure that the service you plan to use is accessible to your participants, and if necessary, discuss the options with them. For example, some meeting participants may prefer to call in on mobile phones rather than book enough time to go back to their office computers. They would have to be convinced that web conferencing is worth the extra hassle. Or participants may be reluctant to download a new program or plug-in, so whenever possible you should select a service that is completely browser-based for the participants.
Almost all web conference services require the presenter to install software or a plug-in before being able to share or upload material to the web. An alternative is for a meeting facilitator to load the software and presentation materials on his/her computer, which would allow the presenter to say, “next slide please”.
The most essential resource you'll need is a facilitator on your team, either volunteer or staff. This person is the enthusiast that plays with the web conference service and helps everyone else how to use it. He or she answers questions, demonstrates the service, troubleshoots, encourages other participants, and generally makes the technology easier for everyone else. Without this person, don't even attempt web conferencing. He/she should expect to spend at least two hours playing before facilitating a real meeting. This person is not necessarily the presenter or official facilitator, by the way. It may be an informal IT champion, or an administrative assistant who is comfortable with technology.
You can count on some frustration and problems the first couple of times you try this. Don't be discouraged. For a detailed description of the problems you may run into, read this research report (pdf file) on working with collocated teams. It was written in 1999 but is still completely relevant. And here, in case you want to see all of the choices out there, are two lists of web-based collaborative tools that summarize current services and prices (one in Excel format and the other in a web table).
Using Groove for web conferences
I'm excited about Groove these days. I wrote about it last year in the context of team collaboration and online workgroups, but was unsuccessful in convincing anyone on my own team to use it. Even though a basic version of Groove is free, it's such a memory hog that people with older computers flatly refuse to tolerate it. Only the fastest computers with the biggest memory chips can comfortably use Groove for day-to-day work.
So for the last year, I've been trying to figure out how nonprofits can use this powerful collaboration tool. And at the same time, I've been looking for ways that nonprofits can have productive virtual meetings. Well, it finally clicked. Groove can provide a rich, functional workspace for people in live meetings. It is okay if it slows down their computers during the actual meeting, because they should be paying attention to the shared information anyway rather than their usual multi-tasking. And the experience of entering a meeting room, whether it's physical or virtual, does involve a transition from one space to another. So the transition into the 'groove space' isn't so annoying. The secret is to open Groove only for meetings, and keep it closed otherwise. It was designed as a complete work space that could handle all projects and teamwork, but it's just too cumbersome.
At any rate, here is a sampling of the tools that Groove can provide:
Each Groove workspace contains a set of distance collaboration tools, to enable people to share documents, co-browse web sites, draw diagrams and so on. Individuals must be invited to the workspace. As soon as they enter the space, they receive all of the files and documents that have been put into the space, such as agendas, background materials, web sites and so on. It takes only a couple of minutes to create a workspace.
There are many other tools, such as a full-featured Document Review function, but the above are sufficient for most meetings.
Groove also offers chat and audio conferencing. If participants have headsets with microphones, they can use Groove for web conferences without telephones. This might be appropriate for staff who want to collaborate cheaply, without long distance phone charges and teleconferencing, but the voice quality may not be great.
Drawbacks of Groove: The program is a large file, over 17 megabytes, so it takes a long time to download it on a dialup connection. It works only with Windows PCs, and if you want to have more than three workspaces you must pay for it ($149 US). Most people won't need more than three workspaces though, since you can delete the ones you're not using.
Other web conference services
The market leader in web conferencing services is WebEx, which charges 45c/minute US per user, plus any teleconferencing costs. In other words, it's prohibitive for most Canadian businesses and nonprofits, but it gives you an idea of the mainstream pricing. It requires a download for all participants. Another key player, PlaceWare, was recently bought by Microsoft and added to the “Office System” of collaboration tools. Knowing Microsoft, they will probably redefine the web conferencing marketplace over the next three years. PlaceWare offers a 15 day free trial – you can take advantage of it for several experimental web conferences. It costs 35c/minute US.
We have been using three web conferencing services besides Groove.
Webconference.com is relatively inexpensive, but certainly not free (starting at $69/month US for up to 6 participants, and the participants can be different each time, so agencies can share an account). However, it's so user-unfriendly that most people, in our experience, can barely stand it. Also, it requires Internet Explorer and a small downloaded plug-in which is blocked by some firewalls. We've almost completely stopped using it.
Glance.net costs $40 US/month for one presenter, with no limits on number of participants or usage. Each presenter can install it on two computers, so one of the 'presenters' could be a computer in a conference room. Glance is extremely easy to use for participants; all they have to do is go to a web address (http://username.glance.net) and fill in a session number. Participants see the entire computer screen of the presenter; in other words, it provides full one-way application sharing. Advantages: Participants don't need to download any software or plugins, and it seems to work well over firewalls and on non-Windows computers. I tested it on a Lindows machine with Netscape. It's inexpensive compared to other services, and very simple to use. Disadvantages: Glance shows EVERYTHING on the screen, including embarrassing instant messages that might crop up during a session. The actual number of participants should be under 20, because the speed of downloading the shared pages is limited by the slowest connection. One person with a crummy dial-up connection to the Internet would slow down the entire presentation for everyone. You can sign up for a one-day free trial here, which you could use to lead a presentation, and test your system here.
Enunciate's Empower service, launched in August 2003, works with most operating systems and any recent version of Internet Explorer or Netscape, and doesn't require downloads unless participants want to share their own files with people in the conference. It's easy to use and is integrated with Enunciate's excellent teleconferencing service. We are using this service for many meetings that can't use Groove. It costs about 25c/minute/person Canadian (the pricing varies), plus any teleconferencing costs. You can use your own teleconferencing provider, or 'daisychain' 3-way calling. Empower is good for important meetings, but the costs mount up – a five person meeting would cost about $75/hour. It would only make sense if the alternative was high travel costs. It offers full two-way application sharing, plus a simpler service that posts PowerPoint slides to the web and allows a presenter to show a series of slides.
Finally, if you want to web conference with just one other location, you can try the new version of Windows Messenger from Microsoft. It's free, but it requires the Windows XP operating system. Windows Messenger allows you to share any program on your computer, including a web browser, with another user who also has Windows Messenger and an XP computer. You could use it to give a distance presentation with a group of people who were all viewing one computer screen, or to collaborate with one other person. It does not allow multiple users. Windows Messaging offers audio conferencing so if you have a headset you don't need a separate phone line – that saves on long distance charges. You would have to test the quality of the sound to ensure it was adequate. We're having firewall problems with it, so haven't had a chance to test it.
**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
Alerta, reported in October's Fast Company, is a service that combines telephones with the Internet to collect and analyse health information in areas with poor or no internet access. It's a beautiful example of appropriate technology. “Health professionals can enter reports online and in real time – - using a fixed phone line, a cell phone or a community public pay phone, or using the Internet, if that is available. Authorized users log on and follow instructions on a card or a simple voice-prompted menu and enter digital information about cases of disease and disaster incidents. They can attach additional information in voice files.” Voxviva, the company that developed Alerta, is “a voice and data solutions provider dedicated to public health, [founded] in 2001 to help isolated communities access computing power through the touch-tone telephone. Because phone usage does not require literacy nor much electricity, Voxiva’s system benefits regions that are short on both, enabling users to input and retrieve information by tapping phone buttons, listening to messages and speaking responses.”
I'm now getting over 100 spam emails a day in my personal inboxes, mostly because my email addresses were publicly posted on the web for a few years. They've been picked up by automated 'spam harvesters', and I've been trying various ways to control the problem for months.
For a couple of good articles on approaches to fighting spam, see The Guardian Angels of E-Mail and Stopping Spam at the Gateway.
My preference is to block spam before it reaches the inbox on my own computer. If I filter on my own PC, I'm still forced to download all that junk (which takes time, especially when I'm travelling), and forces me to run extra software, which slows down the other programs. Also, it's inefficient if you're interested in controlling spam for a whole organization rather than each person individually. So I've been looking for approaches that (1) can filter spam and viruses at the organizational level rather than the individual's computer, and (2) don't require staff I.T. support. In other words, I want someone else to take care of the problem.
Outsourced email filtering includes background software that is integrated into regular email services. The best-known example is Brightmail, which in Canada is offered to clients of magma.ca, inter.net, AT&T, and sympatico.ca.
0spam.com, a free service, uses a 'whitelisting' approach that rejects any email from someone that is not on your 'allowed' list. It requires unfamiliar senders to answer a question before it forwards the mail to you for approval (that's called a 'challenge-response' approach, and can irritate legitimate senders). 0spam.com is worth looking at, but I found it results in a lot of false positives (rejecting emails that you want), and it's not so useful for organization-wide filtering.
Frontbridge, Postini and 0spam.net (a different company from 0spam.com) offer comprehensive filtering before going to organizational email servers. See this recent review by E-Week regarding spam blockers, including the former two. I've been testing 0spam.net, which uses similar techniques as Frontbridge and Postini but is significantly less expensive for small organizations – about $1/month US for each active email address.
0spam.net is still fairly new, and experiencing some glitches as they grow. However, I'm using them now, and I'm impressed with their filtering accuracy and technical support. One of the developers told me that they've never seen much of the Canadian spam that my accounts pull in! I had no idea that Canadian spam was different from U.S. spam.
The spam problem is affecting everyone, not only those who receive a lot of it. Yesterday, an innocuous message that I sent to a professor at the University of Calgary was repeatedly rejected because their spam filter seems to believe that sympatico.ca is a spammer. I finally gave up trying to contact the I.T. department, and I'm using my contact's home address to exchange emails. More and more, organizations will use aggressive spam filtering that will result in many 'false positives' – rejecting innocent messages. If someone doesn't answer your emails, it may be because they didn't receive them.
Some organizations are rejecting messages from any hotmail account, or from specific countries that are the source of frequent spamming. This could create difficult barriers for low income or out-of-country internet users. When you select spam filters, ensure that the false positive rate is low.
Here's a description of 'Better Together', Putnam's new book, describing civic engagement and its limitations. Bettertogether.org has a number of articles and reports related to Putnam's work, as well as links to relevant research on social capital.
New Wiki Plug-In – Web-Crossing, the popular discussion board software and service, is offering a Wiki web to subscribers. This permits people to collaboratively create web pages.
