Last month I wandered over to Stanford to have a cup of coffee and a chat with “Mr. Creative Commons” himself, Dr. Larry Lessig. My primary reason was to get some background for a book review and for an In the DataCenter piece.
Of course, I also wanted to meet the guy behind the Creative Commons license, as I’ve also had much to do with licensing and structure with BSD and Unix over the years – it’s “in the family” so speak.
It seems that time for speakers / posters is always too limited at conferences. Personally, it always seems I end up in some other room talking about my stuff and I miss a lot of the other presenters. Or sometimes I get major last minute work, and I miss a talk completely. And it’s really annoying.
Wouldn’t it be keen if anyone who is a speaker or poster presenter also had a 2 minute video synopsis of their work like an abstract produced and hosted on the Internet available for viewing? Of course, the first thing I’d hear back is “We don’t have the time at a conference – it’s rush, rush, rush.” Yah, we all know that.
Well, I’m beginning to make preparations for Singapore to talk to people about my paper Lessons Learned in Massive Video Production (MVP) for University Alumni Outreach on the yearlong trials of using Massive Video Production we created at ExecProducer to encourage alumni participation through produced video by students, faculty, staff, and alumni of the department.
Working with the Physics Department of the University of California at Berkeley, ExecProducer created an entirely new mechanism to subscribe, process, and approve up to 2,500 video productions viewable via the web internationally on a custom website, with links to news and information on endowments and donations. The trials were launched as part of former Chancellor Berndahl’s rejuvenation of the department after an official report critical of the future of the department was released.
Wow, after a year of work with my old department at Cal doing a case study of technical issues in massive video production (MVP) for physics alumni outreach, lots of late nights, and crossing my fingers, it all paid off. I got an acceptance to the ACM SIGCHI Advances in Computer Entertainment Conference (ACE2004) to present the results of our work in Singapore in June.
I’ve never been to Singapore before, so I’m really excited. As CTO of ExecProducer, I’m proud of what we achieved over the last year technically. As a Berkeley physics alumna, I’m proud to have done a project with my department. And as a writer, I’m absolutely thrilled that they liked it.