A voice from afar: my remote attendance at #blcamp

[NOTE: 17:00 Sun 22-APR-2012: A week on, and links have been added, and a couple of other light edits edited]

For the last few weeks, I was aware that BlueLightCamp ("an unconference style event for people working within and around Blue Light Emergency Services") was coming up sometime soon. On Sunday morning (while getting ready to engage as usual with other digital followers of Britain's best know simple tale of country folk, via (the) #thearchers hashtag) I noticed a few tweets from people who were making their way to Manchester for the event. I thought, "Oh yes, it must be today - oh well, another event I can't afford the time (never mind the money, which I can't afford either) to travel from Orkney to attend" (or an internal monologue to that effect). To be perfectly honest, other than a very peripheral involvement with local authority emergency planning some years ago (and a year or so assisting senior managers to crystallise their business continuity plans across my employing organisation - plans to ensure that, as far as reasonably practicable we could continue to provide services such as residential care homes, ferry services, child protection services, harbour facilities for oil tankers, payroll services and the like, despite any sort of significant disruptive event which might come along) I have little excuse for my abiding interest in risk, disaster, public safety and the like, so I would never have travelled to this particular event, even from (say) Sheffield (maybe I should have said Glossop?)!

But then I saw a tweet about livestreaming the event, from @JohnPopham, so I thought I would dip in for a few minutes, just to see how effective the livestreaming from this event was. I have about 20 years experience of remote attendance - it's an island thing - and I have every sort of positive, negative, inspiring, dull and surprising experience of trying to follow events over some sort of link. Throughout that period (and arguably since Neolithic times), Orkney has used various technologies for communication.  [Do *not* start giving prehistoric or Viking examples here. Ed.] In the 70s CB radio was used informally, particularly in the smaller islands, for keeping in touch when on the move, and just for chatting to neighbours without racking up the phone bill. In late 70s and 80s a network of electronic whiteboards (with audio) were installed in community schools around the islands. These were used to deliver all sorts of education (mainly for adults) in places like Papa Westray, North Ronaldsay, Shapinsay, Westray and other islands of Orkney (delivered from Kirkwall, Aberdeen or beyond - or from one of the other islands). I think communication was provided overbrand, shiny new ISDN2 lines, but it may have been good old-fashioned analogue phone lines: this article (pdf 3MB), found at random with Google, and of indeterminate date (possibly the early 90s, at which point electronic whiteboards were still in full operation) has some background historical material.

My first direct experience of this sort of thing was in the mid 90s, by which time Sony Contact ISDN2-based video conferencing equipment had started to supplement (and eventually replace) the electronic whiteboards in Orkney, and also (one of the earliest visible manifestations of the University of the Highlands and Islands) began to be installed in Learning Centres in communities across the Highlands and Islands, from Unst to Perth, and from Argyll to Elgin (and the Western Isles, too!). These devices were literally used until they fell to pieces. Adult education, staff meetings, instrumental tuition, consultations with local authority planners, remote participation in Council meetings in Kirkwall, project work for the Pathfinder North broadband project (and many others), the list is endless (and worth a blog post of its own, in fact the development of digital communications in the Highlands and Islands deserves a whole historical wiki of its own!) The price of the units drifted downwards (but has never been less than a few £000 for a setup that is actually fit for the many purposes expected of it), and the functionality improved (eventually most were replaced with ISDN6 units, at which point the issue of call charges started to become very significant).

Most videoconferencing units around here are now Panasonic IP-based units, and in rooms which are set out by default for their use (the UHI uses the term "VC studio" for these rooms). We alson have Glow Meet, provided by the Scottish Government, and available free-at-the-point-of-use, in every classroom in Scotland (as long as their local authority has put a bit of effort into implementing it on their network), and able to be connected free (and with relatively little effort) to any PC (or Mac) in the world which a teacher or school wants to communicate with.

Some elements of (undocumented ) best practice have arisen over the years, for example:

• don't wear jackets with rattly buttons on the cuffs - the rattling is annoying at the other end of the link
• turn off your mic when not speaking, especially if you want to rustle meeting papers
• the likelihood of sucess decreases (exponentially, or logarithmically, to zero) as you increase the number of sites taking part in the link
• if you serve coffee during the meeting DO NOT use saucers
• if you are bothered what the people at the other end are going to see, think carefully about where the seats in the meeting room are in relation to the camera
• it is pointless being able to see all the 23 participants at the other end of the link if you cannot hear (clearly) what they are saying
• if you want to get the best out of a negotiation over a video link, make sure your side has someone AT BOTH ENDS
• it is humanly impossible for most people to concentrate on what is going on at the other end of the link for more than an hour or 2 without a break
• it is too easy to believe that the technology is "useless", "not for me", "not for this type of event", etc, if some thought is not done (and some explicit agreements reached) on how best to use it 
• failures of the technology only account for 25% (I made that figure up) of the failures they are perceived to cause; the other 75% (or whatever) are due to organisational, administrative or human factors which might have been solved with minimal effort before the meeting starts
• ALWAYS TEST THE LINK. Test EVERYTHING about the link: make sure that the person to be dialling on the day also does the dialling for the tests. Do AT LEAST 2 of the following: test it a week out, a day out AND an hour or less out from the event. If you are planning to link more than 2 sites, do MORE testing!!
• if the meeting involves people not used to it, allow 10 minutes at the beginning of the meeting to let them get used to seeing themselves on screen! (As smartphones and youtube take over the world, this is less of an issue!)
• ALWAYS distribute (in advance) a mobile phone number (which is going to actually have a signal!!) for someone who will DEFINITELY be at each of the sites on the day
• consider using a telephone conference if you don't really need to see them at the other end!
• what is your aim in using the technology? Are you following along, or listening in, to an event that is far away, or are you aiming to participate fully (albeit without the networking at coffee time, and without the coffee, too). Both are possible, but need to be set up very differently

and so on ... It has always struck me that this was a bit similar to the "radio discipline" used by those who use personal mobile radio equipment (most emergency services, for example), but that we were expecting everyone from junior administrative or technical staff, to CEOs and board/elected members to instinctively know how it would work. As is so often the case, in my opinion, the focus was on the technology, not on getting the most out of it.

In the last couple of years, the concept of webinars and of livestreaming events over the internet has gained a very welcome momentum. As with so much of the new web-based and mobile technology of the last 5 years, this has in some ways completely changed what is possible, as it is no longer necessary to find chunks of funding to buy and operate the necessary equipment. Everyone with a smartphone, a Bambuser or equivalent account, and a 3G-or-better broadband link can livestream anything they like, for almost nothing. For me, though, the issues about how to use the new stuff effectively in the context of events are not as new as the technologies themselves. Here are a few initial questions and observations:

• how can we get make sure that ALL venues have enough low-latency, uncontended bandwidth to allow proper interactive audio or video links when they are required (anyone suggesting satellite for remote areas, please leave this blog NOW!!)
• what is the style and tone of the event, and what is are the resulting quality expections of in-person and remote attendees?
• for events which have to charge for inperson attendance, is it reasonable to charge for remote attendance, and if so how much? If not, will that threaten the viability of the whole event, if people choose to attend remotely for nothing rather than travel?
• how do we avoid unnacceptable impact on proceedings at the venue for the people who are actually attending the event in person? 
• how will people feel about discussion sensitive matters with a camera or microphone pointing at them? (I thought @TheCustodySgt and others faced this issue head on at #blcamp )
• how can organisers of events cope with the overheads (financial, time and administrative) in providing livestreaming (or more interactive remote attendance) options?
• is it reasonable to aim for some equivalence of the status of in-person and remote attendance at some events?
• do we always need video as well as audio?
• if we provide registration pages, signposts to meeting rooms, heating and sandwiches for in-person attendees, what equivalent information and other stuff can we feasibly provide to remote attendees?
• what do we call remote attendees (I suggest remotees, by the way!)? I don't mind too much about language, but "remote" has a kind of awkward, outside, far-away connotation, which may not be what we want to suggest
• are there spin-off, unexpected benefits, risks or costs of livestreaming or interactive remote attendance (one thing I have noticed is that Scottish events which are livestreamed in a competent way attract attendance from abroad, which might not otherwise have happened; another thought that I have is that livestreaming can make events accessible to people for whom travel is difficult for reasons other than simple geography)?
• how can we convince the people for whom the norm is to jump in a car (or a train) and travel for 90 minutes to Stirling Management Park (or Manchester, or Birmingham) every other week to access the full panoply of interesting and exciting events, that livestreaming and interactive remote attendance options would also benefit them?
• is it an issue that remote attendees may swamp event hashtags on twitter, as they are likely to have a technical setup that makes tweeting easier than the average in-person attendee (I am always anxious that my remote attending enthusiam may cross some line in this area!)?

For me, on Sunday, John's livestreaming was good enough to ensure that I abandoned The Archers by 10:20 (maybe someone can tell me if Tom and Tony Archer have agreed whether to upgrade their farm management software, and if the upgrade went smoothly?). In fact, I barely surfaced for a coffee now and again until the excellently entertaining #blcamp raffle raffle was over at about 17:30. It was a GovCamp, and I am persistent, so the various technical and organisational frustrations throughout the day did not really matter to me. It was quite clearly a BRILLIANT event, and I found much in the #blcamp content to think about, especially Farida Vis's session on rumour and social media (it seems to me this has general application, and does not need an underlying riot to make it useful!), which I have watched again on YouTube (where the audio is a lot clearer than I received in my kitchen on Sunday). I also loved the introductions and session pitches (recordings of all the #blcamp webcasts are also available on John's Bambuser timeline - find 15 April!): they were more entertaining than much mainstream weekend TV or Radio (I got to see @DanSlee demand cake, for goodness sake!), and I will use extracts to allow those not yet familiar with GovCamps what they are all about. 

When normal inperson attendees from Stirling or Birmingham are demanding (and routinely being provided with) remote attendance options at events (IslandGovCamp, say!); when remote attendees can hear proceedings clearly (and see any slides, as the presenter describes them); and when the blog posts of remote attendees focus more on the content of the event than they do on the technological and adminstrative arrangements for livestreaming; then we will have cracked some of my 20-year-old issues!

Many thanks to all the organisers and participants at #blcamp - it was a great day!