Hi all, just wanted to add to this debrief thread a little by contrasting 4 impressions of the event.
I got a lot out of the actual discussions but hope these notes on the logistics are a useful record too. 1. The access grid session (fri 12.00-14.00) I wasn't at an access grid location - just at the Green Bench by myself, so I couldn't experience the high bw video discussion and didn't have anyone to share the conversation locally with. We intially tried a java web app called EVO that was quite impressive and could interface with the access grid, but it was unusable because of the sound and video quality probably due to bw issues on my dsl line here. Lloyd who tried really hard with the other tech's to get it to work made an interesting comment which was that my low bw feed was 'destroying the illusion' for everyone else and we dropped back to a skype audio only feed with Zita who kindly read comments from a chat window for me to the audience. In this session I was basically an onlooker, receiving a broadcast and the whole thing had a feeling of listening to a national radio program with panelists in a studio and txt message public participation interface. I wasn't always aware of which location other people were in, and it had the feeling of eavesdropping on one physical location rather than many so I could sense that it worked well for those involved. For me though it was a broadcast experience essentially. 2. The Waka (fri 22.00-24.00) On the river that night we were in quite a difficult technical situation, with only a small part of river where we could access the mesh, sound problems (as I forgot the headset) and also just the flakey international internet backhaul. We also had to paddle and drift to stay online until we found a mudbank to nudge into. All that meant that we only had very patchy communication with the guys in .nl before we started and we just got online minutes before the session started, so we didn't have any time to test or discuss much what we were going to do before hand and had been offline for several hours by then too. We started the karakia as soon as they said the network was working because we knew it would just be a window of opportunity and I'm sure they didn't have much idea of what our situation was until afterwards. We were happy to have opened the korero with the karakia in any case. Our experience on the waka was great (as always) - it was just fantastic to be out on the river again and in the night time too, and we had great discussions with the crew. Don commented that he had come on board for the international element of the evening, but that afterwards that side had an incidental feel to it compared to the local experience. 3. Energy-information (sat 22.00-24.00) Finally on Saturday night I was on the energy information panel with Rasa Smite in Latvia, and Sasha Geffen and Eric Kluitenberg in the electrosmog cafe. Finally for this one, the video, audio and network issues were all solved a good couple of hours before the start (even though mtr traces were showing 90% packet loss to europe at times.) The working network meant that the conversation was able to develop without worrying about the technology - illusion more or less in tact. In this one we really did interact and develop a flowing discussion in what felt more like a shared space and were able to discuss the topics at hand productively. 4. The stream I never actually got the stream to work during any of these sessions. Just to preserve bandwidth I wasn't viewing the site at all during the sessions, and haven't been able to navigate to the archives so look forward to seeing more of the festival from the archives. 5. Offline discussions Throughout the festival I had offline chat discussions with Zita, Sonja and Gerbrando - and these were very important in making things work - so many thanks for the support. * Some observations. Electrosmog seems to have been conceived from a point of view that the network is a given - whereas in reality it is not at all a given. From working with contexts like http://wsfii.org I know that in many places around the world connectivity is extremely limited and expensive and unreliable. Even here in NZ it can be problematic. - expect people to have radically different network situations - higher bandwidth forms of communication are the most difficult to make reliable technically - low bw is good - you can have a good discussion using a low bw method like irc or txt or audio - when the tech breaks at it's own level, it disconnects the discussion 'breaks the illusion' - a good audio stream is better than a bad video stream - a reliable irc session is better than broken audio. - degrade gracefully to a lower bw mode of communication at the expense of media richness - test network connections well in advance so that channels are established - time issues - pay attention to time zones (we need sleep too) - archive - live searchable archiving - 3rd locations - networked facilitators not present at sites that are being connected vive a network centric view that can solve issues as they arise. - be more distributed - build on local events connected together All in all I think it was a good attempt at a distributed festival, and I think these kinds of forms of remote participation are only going to expand and continue to be important tools for us here and I look forward to more experiments along these lines. cheers /julian _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
