So Flexible Everybody Wants In: A Problem of Success

I've just attended a webinar organised by Project Nomad:

'Collaboration Technology for Mobile & Flexible Working'
A FREE ONLINE LIVE WEBINAR kindly hosted by PGi & Cisco

I have been out of mainstream ICT work for the last 15 months or so (working on a review of Orkney Islands Council's business continuity arrangements in all services), so I am greatly encouraged to see more and more events using webex and similar technology, and to be involved in early discussions with SOCITM managers about how the professional organisation for public and third sector ICT managers might exploit this sort of technology in a coherent and comprehensive way over the next few years. It has seemed to me (from the perspective of the remote and rural north, or "civilisation", as we like to call it here!) that the technical bits and pieces which make attendance at some events feasible at all (and to allow others to do so at a much lower carbon and hard-cash cost) have been around (and affordable) for quite a few years (at least 5 years now). It has become quite frustrating how difficult it is to find people on the Big Island of the UK to engage in exploring the widespread expoitation of this technical stuff (difficult to find them, that is, without a literally impossible amount of travel to set things up, or to attend project meetings to set things up!!).

So: two and a half cheers for Project Nomad for persuading PGi and Cisco to host this event, which started off with a very upbeat description from Chris Thomas (of PGi) of the benefits of collaboration, and of using his company's infrastructure to enable it. I wanted to ask how the costs and benefits of their hosted solution stack up against the costs and benefits of arrangements similar to the good examples of online collaboration already underway in the public sector in Scotland (e.g. the Glow Intranet in education, "lighting up learning" with, among other things Glow Meet; and, the UHI Millennium Institute managing its own infrastructure, from Shetland, to connect more than 10,000 3-or-more-site video/collaborative further and higher education lectures and and administrative meetings per year on behalf of academic partners from Shetland to Perthshire, and from Moray to Argyll).

It was ironic that what let down this excellently-conceived event , and led to its abandonment until another day was a slight failure of administration/organisation, coupled with a huge appetite for very flexible working: according to Gavin Kinnaird (the Project Nomad host), lots of unregistered (or late-registering) attendees meant that the event's technical configuration could not cope, and the audio system became overwhelmed. This is a problem of success, and demonstrates the demand for this mode of working in the age of YouTube, Skype, Facebook and Twitter. It also demonstrates that traditional management and administrative techniques, and approaches to event-organisation, still have their place. One would not allow people just to turn up to a one-venue event, in case there were not enough chairs; in my opinion, one should not allow people just to turn up to online events, in case the infrastructure cannot cope. It was doubly ironic that this particular event suffered from this "unexpected" factor, because the pre-event admin (including a 60 minute reminder to get connected, and not miss the beginning) was (most unusually for webinars in general) excellent, and would have enabled restrictions on login to succeed without damaging reasonable attendance!

I'm greatly looking forward to the rescheduled event, and perhaps for some consideration of this topic during the discussion. Conclusions about the suitability of this mode of working should not be drawn from this problem of success: however, among the lessons available are either that "sometimes things just go wrong", or that "new technologies NEVER entirely remove the need for traditional administrative and management techniques".