It's been a good week for #livestreaming

Today, I have a day off work, but I hope to listen in to the launch of http://digitalcommonwealth.co.uk/, which aims 

to enhance the capacity of individuals and groups to use freely available mobile digital (and social) media tools and techniques to ensure their voices are heard in a saturated (and often commercially) motivated media landscape, [lowering] the threshold for involvement for individuals and groups so that they can be empowered to exploit creative tools and technologies to tell their stories, digitally. The project reaches out to individuals and groups experiencing social, cultural or economic marginalization, whether related to age, ethnicity, poverty, disability or social isolation.

I'd have added "geography" to that list, but I don't want to quibble!

The indefatigable John Popham will be audio livecasting the event from about 1030 at http://mixlr.com/johnpopham. As I listen, I will be icing cakes for the event mentioned below, but I will also try to follow the #DigCW2014 hashtag (if I can avoid frosted iPhone syndrome!).


On Tuesday, I was able to attend a work-related event running in a room in Edinburgh from my desk in Kirkwall: they streamed the audio from the room to the internet, and put the slides folk were using on a website. Questions from me (and the couple of dozen others across Scotland and the rest of the world) were dealt with via twitter, and I didn't have to spend 9 hours or more travelling, and my employer didn't have to spend about £430 on a day-return plane ticket. 

Great to be following #digilead event from my desk within @OrkneyCouncil Thanks for the audio livestream, pic.twitter.com/TKTG1YlUTn
— Sweyn Hunter (@sweynh) October 22, 2013

To be honest, I would never have asked my employer to send me to Edinburgh for this particular event, and if I had, I hope they would have decided that the cost could not be justified - to all intents and purposes, I would have been excluded from this free event, had a livestreaming option not existed. I think it is safe to say that virtually all other Scottish island residents, and quite a few from the northern, eastern and western mainland periphery, would have been similarly excluded, on grounds of cost and time. (Apart from whinging islanders like myself, there are also people in England, Wales and other parts of the world who might like to be part of what is going on in the central belt of Scotland, as well as those with mobility issues, child care responsibilities, and numerous other motives for taking part "from where they are", rather than "at where the room which is booked is").

I'd have found it personally very hard to spend Tuesday out of Orkney: as it was I was able to use the lunch break to make some last-minute Orkney Storytelling Festival arrangements, and I hope the people at the sell-out ghost story event tonight at Roeberry House enjoy the refreshments which should result!)

And yesterday, I did some testing at work which should (over the coming months) allow us to work out how to make audio livecasting work for the events and meetings we may wish to broadcast.

After all, (to adapt a question from John Popham asked recently on his blog) if there is no charge for tickets, and there are no intellectual property rights issues with your event (and even, in some cases, if these issues can be addressed), and there is bandwidth at your venue, why would you not arrange for it to be audio webcast, using almost free technology?