Online Conferencing
It’s been a while since I first proposed this idea. I still feel this has great potential for the genealogy community and shouldn’t be that difficult – or expensive – to do. There are some wonderful tools for online communication and collaboration that give us the technical ability to conference. The challenge will be learning how to use these tools to conduct meetings, workshops and conferences.
Our first challenge is communication – choosing the best platform for holding these events. I like Skype for several reasons:
- It supports all major operating systems – Windows, Mac and Linux.
- Skype users can call any other Skype user – worldwide – at no charge.
- Skype provides video calling, audio calling and instant messaging capabilities.
- The conference call feature supports up to 10 participants.
- Skypecasts allow up to 100 people to participate in the online event.
- Conference calls can include people connecting by “normal” telephone.
Skype is one of several possibilities. Experimenting with various platforms is the best way to not only determine which is best for our project, but to learn which features can best be put to use to support our efforts.
Another important requirement is a way to display presentations supporting the discussion or talk. Several tools are now available to support this. One of the most interesting is Zoho. They have an outstanding toolset for document creation, collaboration and online conferencing. Using Zoho Viewer, I uploaded a short slideshow which Viewer converted to Flash so I could embed it here for readers to view. Click on the slides to move through the presentation.
Zoho Show and Zoho Meeting provide additional features giving the speaker/moderator control of a presentation so the slides are synched with the speaker. It can also be used to offer real-time demonstrations from a user’s desktop.
Other online systems like ThinkFree and Google Apps have similar features and then there are several fee-based systems that can also be put to use.
I’ve created an Online Genealogy Conference Project wiki to get the ball rolling and hope that anyone interested will stop by and join the effort. Anyone can visit and comment on any of the project pages, but only project members can add or edit actual wiki content. If you would like to join the project, send me a message or leave a comment at the project home page and I will add you to the team. You will need a (free) Zoho account to access the wiki.
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