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The Commons

The Zero Emissions II TeleConference - Team Work

A Few interesting Details

Planning a Teleconference? - Some First Guidelines

Teleconferencing: Is it Conference-Lite?

Your Feedback and Views

This conference is being organized under the broader structure of The Commons, which has been described as:

A shared World Wide Web site, and associated linking technologies and communications arrangements, which has been created to accommodate and support programs and activities which take as their target issues relating to the better understanding and management of technology as it impacts on people in their daily lives. More specifically, our goal is to make creative use of these new and much "softer" technologies (at least we think they are) in order to generate freely available "databases" (libraries, if you prefer), discussion spaces (along the lines of town meetings), and, in the process, expanded communities of interests on a wide array of important technology, society and sustainable development issues of public policy and private practice, as a step toward more informed, more broadly supported, and more effective policies and actions. As is appropriate, given its concerns, this is organized as a travel-free, resource-sparing, low-emissions, and, we firmly hope, thoroughly convivial, undertaking.

As a shared enterprise, all aspects of The Commons depend on the active participation of concerned individuals and groups who are invited not only to make use of these facilities, but also to shape and support them.

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The Zero Emissions II TeleConference - Team Work

This particular Web site has been constructed as a team project, indeed as is virtually every activity under The Commons. And as with most of these, the present conference is also thoroughly international.

The original motors behind this venture were a series of exchanges between Eric Britton of EcoPlan and Robert Ayres of Insead, who have collaborated on a number of occasions in the last years on similar projects, which led to a small demonstration project last summer, which had two objectives.

• To see if it might somehow be directly useful in support of Ayres' path-breaking work with the Institute of Advanced Studies of the United national University to extend their earlier initiatives in the area of "Zero Emissions" research.

• And to serve as a first, quick and dirty, 'proof of principle' exercise that might demonstrate how the resources of the WWW and the associated technologies that have long been of interest to EcoPlan and The Commons, might be harnessed to make a contribution in such a specific case. A full 'report' on this first stage effort is available in the Wed site of that original conference itself, which we are maintaining under The Commons both as a possibly interesting historical artifact and as a useful reference point in itself for those interested in the topics that it addresses. It can be accessed directly here: Zero Emissions I Pilot Project.

In order to respond to these challenges, we ended up having to go out and seek help, which fortunately we were able to find. Volunteers came in from several sides, key among them our new found friends from Crawford Systems in the Netherlands and CyberLynx in the small rural community of Coos Bay Oregon, who worked hand in hand with us to make this site easier to use, more informative, and, of critical importance, more fully interactive.

We also received consistent help from our old friend and former colleague Philippe Crist who is now with the Environment Directorate of the OECD, and who, incidentally, served as WebMaster of our first international CyberConfernce in support of the March 1996 OECD World Conference on Sustainable Transportation Systems in Vancouver, Canada (which of course you can also reference directly here at The Commons). We also benefited from the support and encouragement of our old friends at The Centre@Hamline who have continued to maintain the interactive portion of the August pilot project which you can also consult directly here.

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A Few Interesting Details about the Preparatory Efforts

• No one of those involved in the development of this Web site ever met once during the course of the work effort

• Most of those involved have never even met each other in person

• Most of the work was carried out on a volunteer basis (Less than 20% of the costs of this effort were actually paid for in currency, though we would greatly like to find additional funding to compensate those who gave freely of their time for at least some of their efforts)

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Planning a Teleconference? - Some First Guidelines

If you are interested in organizing something along these lines yourselves - and certainly if your project shares the interests and concerns of The Commons in any way we would be pleased to hear from you about eventual collaboration - we can suggest several things you would do well to keep your eye on as you make your basic planning and work program decisions

• You will need to give yourselves at least 2/3 months in order to get your Web site and the supported structures in order.

• If you are going to undertake this yourself - and assuming that you want to improve on what we have managed to accomplish here in terms of ease of use and the critical interactivity components - you had best set aside anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 in order to get it right. (Unless of course, that you have ways of bringing in talented and dedicated people and groups who will help you do this 'off the economy', which of course is splendid in some ways but does nothing for those souls who have rents to pay and mouths to feed. But even under these circumstances, you are probably going to have to have access to funding in the $5,000-10,000 range just to handle the basic infrastructural, set up, and associated communications costs.)

• The successful teleconference should have a defined time focus and goal. It should be able to respond to your visitors' implied questions as to: what is this for? why should we both? etc. If you can't, you are likely to have a party with an empty house. Which beings us to our last point under this heading…

• God is in the details.. and more precisely in the details of hosting and managing the conference. It is perhaps tempting to envisage a conference on the Web as something which you can just set up and then sit back and watch the action happen. After all, anybody, quite literally anybody, can prepare and pubis a Web page (and almost everybody appears to have had a go at it). Many have tried that route, and in virtually all cases they have ended up playing to an empty house (for more on this move over to the Teleconferencing track where you will see a number of examples of such projects that have worked, and have not.) You must plan to give at least as much time and resources to the management of a teleconference as you do to its planning. So caveat…

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This is a tempting inference. Certainly if you spend a few hours with us here you will be in a good position to answer it for yourself. In the meantime, let us share with you some of our thoughts on the subject:

• The best teleconference (or whatever you wish to call the use of the Web in these ways) is probably one that is associated with a specific event or challenge.

• Think of it not as a universal tool that is going to wipe out overnight any and all of the old tools, including the physical meetings, professional journals, and whatever, but a medium to which you now have access that, with proper preparation, sufficient resources and a great dose of common sense, can be a valuable addition to the repertory of working tools that you have at your disposal.

• Bear in mind that there is a great deal more to this than the World Wide Web as you know it today. Already in this conference we are trying to stretch beyond the more 'traditional' (strange word to use with a phenomenon that is barely half a decade old) Web practices, and bring in other supporting telecommunications innovations (such as WebCasts, multi-media, one on one and multi-point videoconferences, NetMeeting and various types of 'chat' sessions, etc.).

An excellent use of a teleconference is as a support system for any conference or project that requires occasional physical meetings. If it is done correctly, this technology can help your people "hit the ground running" when indeed they all manage to get together in the same place.

It also provides you with a fine means for "keeping them together", all or in part, once the psychical meeting breaks up and they all go back home. In this way you suddenly have access to a built-in mechanism which in part at least will guarantee that promised follow-up occurs, as agreed and on schedule.

Increasingly, the technologies which are going to come on line are going to permit us to 'drop in' to conferences which treat matters that may be of interest to you but which otherwise we simply cannot fit into our busy schedules. Thus, we will begin to see our participation in conferences as not just a yes or no decision, but one that we can handle in layers as our interest and time (and resources) permit. On the present conference we intend to provide several examples of this.

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Your Feedback and Views:

The above represents not just a report on how our project was carried out, but also goes on to elaborate more generally on issues which many of you have considerable experience and certainly many ideas and views. We hope you will take advantage of the facilities of this conference - and in particular the WebBoard - to share your views and suggestions with us on all this.

In this same spirit we would draw your attention to the "Complaints and Suggestions" rubric in the WebBoard. Its use is self-explanatory. We are confident that you will find some good uses for it - and, if we are up to it, we will at least be able to respond and possibly even correct. And just in case you have something nice to say about the conference, you might consider putting down a few words on that there as well. The help responds to encouragement.

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