13th
1/90: Conferencing Pass
As I discussed in an earlier post, the telephone metaphor for remote collaboration technologies is profoundly broken. Successfully initiating a video conference or other type of rich collaboration technology session requires a lot of information that is highly variable - not only is the call information infrequently used by many participants, but it varies dramatically from time to time. So, in order to make this process a little more manageable, I looked at how “call routing” works in both air transportation and commercial shipping. In each case, the parcels (I’ll use parcels for both, though I do note that airline passengers are not always treated as well as cardboard boxes) receive an artifact that is both human and machine readable and contains nearly all the information needed to make a connection between sender in receiver. So, for my first shot at this 90 in 90 project, I present: Conferencing Pass.
The Conferencing Pass is an artifact modeled on the boarding pass and airbill. Unlike the traditional conference document, which is usually a remote IP address scribbled on scrap paper, the Conferencing Pass is a printable artifact that contains all the meeting information needed to establish and begin troubleshooting a connection. In addition, it contains a machine-readable QR code that can be scanned by a kiosk in order to initiate a call, automatically set the camera to focus on the assigned seats, or initiate phone calls to near-side or far-side tech support in case of problems. Additionally, call initiation through a kiosk allows for remote monitoring of calls, allowing a NOC to anticipate problems to see when calls have or have not been initiated. Such a system can also alert users to mistakes, such as being in the wrong room or trying to initiate a call too early.
There’s no guarentee that this type of system could make conferencing as joyful as air travel, but it is an alternative approach to the scheduling/call initiation problem that places more of the session details in the users hands and provides a way to send those parameters to a control system in a highly decentralized, automated way.
