Re:My "siggraph experience" (Score 1)

As someone who just came back from SIGGRAPH and whose mission it was to RECORD and STREAM over the web all the PAPERS, PANELS and many of the COURSES presented there, I understand your plea for adding this media type to the SIGGRAPH experience. A dedicated team of volunteers (yes, volunteers!) did all this work, capturing over 200 important, but ephemeral events. We are working hard still, in post production, to get the server in place so we can stream it out over the web. Our goal is to be up and running in September with over 240Gigs of content: lectures, papers, panels, slidesets, demos and audio. It will happen. During the actual event, we worked closely with SIGGRAPH TV, another group of dedicated volunteers, and the AVW crews (a great bunch of true professionals). SIGGRAPH TV's charter included some local broadcasts, and hundreds of interviews with key personnel, as well as covering other special events. We discussed doing live webcasts, both with them and on our own, but it was not possible, alas. As for your comment, "Anyways I'm sure they could have pulled this off easily, one webcasting server, 1 camera man, one reporter and one video editing/archiving /web technician," well, I can hardly begin to describe how naive that sounds. It is a much bigger event that you can possibly imagine. Don't get me wrong, it's a great idea, but having just worked about 100 hours with little sleep or time to enjoy the conference, I bristle at your suggestion that it was easy. I assure you, your suggestion would be anything but easy. That being said, we are still very proud of the unprecedented work that we did accomplish. We would like to see this effort continue to grow (possibly to include a webcast). We think what we pulled off was great and executed well. Please visit our website http://online.siggraph.org in September, let us know what you think and voice your support for this kind of electronic outreach. And if attending SIGGRAPH is still your ultimate goal, why not volunteer?