Before the YK07 / YKSL memoir meme burns out I thought I'd offer my observations, some commentary and suggestions for future telepresence at YK.
Since I was not an organizer of YKSL whatever facts and figures offered are just what I saw and learned from chats and IMs. As always, caveat emptor and YMMV.
YKSL was the Biggest political event in SL so far. Total paid attendance was said to be 129, although like the real world (RL) equivalent not all the attendees showed up at any single in-world session.
Memorable events, apart from the first-generation buzz of YKSL itself, included the avatar discussion during the Presidential Forum, the high level of excitement and quality of discourse among the participants and of course the parties. And as to that, let me just quickly say that Gen. JC Christian, Patriot kept us laughing with his roller skating avatar, "Mighty Falafel of Terrible Vengeance" and other antics.
From the YKSL environment avatars could pose questions to session moderators for relay to speakers and a number of these were asked. Aside from the coolness factor, this feedback channel was a validating and necessary milestone for YKSL. As for that, I wonder who actually asked the first relayed question from SL? Put it in your CV :)
Most events seemed to attract about 2 dozen avatars. The Presidential Forum attracted at least 40. The "Impeachment Ball" and "Cafe Wellstone" parties gathered enough avatars to max the region into sluggishness, maybe 50 or so. There were no major instances of trollery ("griefing", in the SL lexicon) that I noticed.
In general, due to limitations in the computational fabric of SecondLife, effective gatherings max out at about 70 avatars, and responsivity gets sluggish with clustered avatar counts above 50. However in the case of the well-attended Cafe Wellstone closing party I blame the sim sluggishness on the noxious image of the Naked Cheney bartender that likely gouged a bandwidth-sapping hole in the fabric of spacetime and all that is decent.
There were a few glitches, primarily involving video streams and apparently mostly due to on-site connectivity issues at McCormick. One event, the "Blogs and journalism" session was severely affected, with others getting whacked with the odd dropout or two.
The SecondLife grid had suffered a number of irritating outages in the week prior to YKSL, but seemed to be more or less nominal during the convention. I don't know what hair-pulling panics the organizers had to subdue, but from the standpoint of a basic attendee, things seemed to flow fairly well.
Like every other service on the Internet the SL experience can suffer due to network latency or other client-side connectivity problems. For instance my ISP got manky during the Impeachment Ball and gave me a lot of trouble.
Other difficulties arose because many of the YKSL attendees were new to SL and thus had to crash-learn the basics of walking around, teleporting, camera controls and the all important modding of their avatar (pimp my 'tar). I'm sure many found it quite frustrating.
A further exclusionary problem is that the SL client requires a fat net connection as well as a fairly high-powered computer and graphics card.
Of course it's worth noting that a large part of YKSL consisted of watching and discussing live video feeds. Since not much movement is required to do that the responsivity and sluggishness issues did not seem to be critical. Sluggishness was most problematic in the less critical parties.
I did not use the new voice features so nothing to report there.
Apparently there were some people taking "machinema" videos of various sessions, so those who didn't participate this year can still get a taste of YKSL. Hopefully someone will post about that.
Why?
One common question is of the advantage of SL over web-based video + chat, and actually this is a pretty important query. We all know about the usual blogging and commenting dynamics, but I'd just note a couple of things.
In our accustomed blog discussions we draw upon a pretty deep pool of opinion and expertise. Blogs which do not require registration theoretically cast an even wider net, although there is minimal troll filtering in wide-open discussion communities. But take note sometimes of how many different participants there are in a given discussion. DKos may have ~128K members but few comment on a given thread. Fewer still are the more active participants.
So on to the SecondLife environment. Due to the aforementioned structural issues effective local SL discussions are limited to groups of about 50 or so. I don't have any hard data right now but I'll do a little Chertoff-channeling and suggest that 50 potential active voices are enough to keep most discussions lively, and few enough to avoid slipping from group to mob.
Interestingly, many people remark that chat to strangers in 3D environment feels more casual, presumably because you have a visual target in the form of the other avatar(s). I'd have to agree, although at the same time noting that the YKSL participants came from the ranks of the DKos community and many may have known each another previously in that context. As members of a preexisting community there was a additional cohesion that would not be present in a group meeting for the first time.
And I'd suggest that YKSL, like other first generation events, likely attracted a crowd with a good bit of homogenaity along the early adopter dimension. This may have also contributed to the friendly and very positive vibe that was obvious in YKSL.
Next Year
I think there should again be a SecondLife venue, definitely. But let's not forget about plain old video and liveblogging because a bit of logistical tweaking in that regard can really pay off. This year media streams of a number of sessions and events were provided (via Ustream) and that was good. Video is crucial for telepresence and as it is widely supported in browsers the barrier to participation is low. So I'd suggest that the telepresence experience for the next YK can be greatly improved without any bleeding edge miracles. For example:
A telepresence-enabled conference for 2008:
- Basic Physical convention, local attendees and all that entails.
- Remote attendees
- Many attend via web (multimedia and blog-style feedback)
- Some attend via SL or other virtual world
- membership/registration only site.
- Each session or event will instantiate a persistent and dedicated chat/discussion forum.
- Text-based for first generation since bloggers are used to text anyway.
- Sessions become essentially multimedia blog postings, with attendant discussion and archival.
- Rapid read + write communications for remote attendees.
- one or more persons serving as remote proxies per each event. These persons moderate and where necessary relay information and questions between speakers, the audience and the remote attendees.
- The conference provides the volunteer "proxies".
- Each on-site attendee has full access to remote conference capabilities and privileges.
- Each event, being a defacto blog posting, is provided a dedicated page with:
- event stream.
- links to all references and supplemental materials.
- all necessary widgets for support services such as SMS, Flickr, Twitter or whatev-er.
- Each major session has both speaker/panel feeds and periodic audience pan feeds.
- Remote proxy volunteers roaming with streaming cams.
- Parties are off limits to recording and proxies.
- enforce with registration rules.
- All Conference sessions documented and archived for remote access.
Keeping in mind that an effective telepresence experience is not (yet) dependent on a 3D environment, it can nonetheless be greatly enhanced by the availability of that added dimension. And so there are a few enhancements for support of SL or other virtual environment:
- As much as is practical, model the SL space to match the primary RL space.
- RL attendees are pre-registered for login to SL space
- Instead of "hallways", i.e., transitways between sessions and other events, provide a few SL lounges where all RL-SL participants can congregate between events.
- Archiving in "lounges" limited to client-owned chat or other recording.
Note that these SL support enhancements can be easily added to an existing telepresence-enabled conference.
The Money
The fees necessary to support the telepresence-enabled conference described above are only justifiable if the remote attendee is provided with:
- A solid and comprehensive feedback mechanism.
- comprehensive range of event coverage and available content.
- Reliable media feeds and portal infrastructure.
A worthy implementation of telepresence for YK isn't likely to be possible on the cheap, and certainly can't be done for the YKSL fee of US$25. BTW, I'm amazed that the YKSL organizers were able to do as much as they did for 25 bucks a head (and only 129 heads). All those buildings and all that bandwidth, just to mention a couple of things. Kudos for that amazing effort!
Whatever the final cost the fee for the telepresence should be lower than that of the physical admission. Obviously logistics, bandwidth costs and ambition will determine the final number.
Big Thanks to all of the YKSL organizers!
I really enjoyed YKSL, and as I had some intractable scheduling issues and couldn't be there in person even the limited telepresence available through SL and the web media streams allowed me to participate in the conference.
As someone whose professional life over the last decade or so has included a substantial amount of telepresence perhaps I'm a bit more enthusiastic about this subject than most people. But I strongly feel that highly remote-enabled conferences will be the norm sooner, rather than later. It would be nice to see YK in the vanguard of this trend.
And finally a couple of gratuitous, cheap & facile predictions:
The future ( <5 years)
- Remote attendees outnumber physical attendees.
The far future ( <10 years)
- More extensive augmented reality where participants in RL have the ability to overlay 3D immersive environment on the physical world they see.
- A dramatic blurring of the concept of "there".
Beyond that..well, I'd like to keep my embarrassment potential minimal :)
I look forward to next year's YKSL2 / TCFKAYK_SL / NetrootsNation_SL / whatever_SL. See you there!