The Community Forum on Rebuilding New Orleans going on now at LSU in Baton Rouge (sponsored by a whole range of organizations and politicians) is an interesting example of using technology to get a message out- with an attempt to get input in from the field. Steve Bradberry from NOLA Acorn had contacted us few weeks back with this problem: How do we bring the evacuees into the discussion on rebuilding their city? Steve wanted to know - What did PTP know about how to tackle this? The initial idea was for a town hall meeting, which may still be in the works, but this Forum has became an intermediate step within the process of bringing the voices together.
It turns out that if you hold your event at a large university, you’ve got great access to a broad pipe to the net. It also turns out that LSU had a system for remote learning that uses a product called mediasite from sonic foundry. While we have done one (1!) web cast, this was not something we had used before. We consulted with the Steve Mack at luxmedia501 who confirmed that this was a pretty good product. It projects a small video picture, audio along with a slide (I’m not calling it a powerpoint!) in the remainder of the screen. Works fine, but it requires a bit of tech support to produce. Jeff Karlson from Acorn was charged with pulling this together and we started exchanging a lot of phone calls as we coached him through the process. The concept was to have the evacuees connected with Acorn meet at their offices to watch and participate in the event via e-mail. Jeff wanted to make sure that it worked. Really sure, so we we hooked them up with Dan Luke from Hard Working Pictures to produce the web cast. Web casts are funny things because you need video, audio, computer and network skills to get them to work. The webcast started late because it ran into technical problems which is understandable because it was put together very quickly and the connections hadn’t been tested properly until the day of.
Watching it, I was very impressed with its ability to plug you into the process. I’ve had it on in the background most of the day and I wonder how many people could sit through it. Also, I wonder if many emails or phone calls came in from the field. That being said, this is a useful prototype for getting the word out. Let’s hope all the coalitions, organizations, networks that are pulling together to help with Gulf coast recovery work as hard to get the diaspora vidible and plugged in.
