Hey all,
First of all, I'm really impressed at how much effort has gone into the
replies to the question I posted yesterday. I've deliberately not
replied to any one person as I wanted to take time to read all the
responses and to respond to them as a whole. I've not credited different
people against their ideas as I don't want to forget anyone. :)
I agree with a lot of the points made by those I have talked with
before about this and who responded to my initial email. For many of
these items I have simply echoed sentiments from others, interspersed
with my own comments and thoughts.
I think the idea to provide 'collaboration rooms' is a good one and
something we may try and do ourselves so the facilities we have cover
different technologies that we may need to interface with. I see that as
the way forward.
As to why the AG hasn't been growing as fast as before or, from some
perceptions, decreasing in usage I guess there are these things that
have been mentioned or that I have experienced with others. Now, I'm not
necessarily saying these are true but they honestly are areas of
concern. I will attempt to list/collate them point by point.
1. "AG takes support"
a) Sometimes this aspect is least understood and when provisioning a
collaboration environment it is envisaged that people will just 'use' it.
b) Support is an afterthought and sometimes relegated to students - who
then leave and mean that training has to start over.
c) Users want to run things themselves (but need training) and having
to involve someone to 'run' things is complication they don't want.
2) "AG keeps changing"
a) While the current toolkit is very nice, the incompatibility between
it and previous versions has been pointed out to me by more than one
participant that it is a reason they are turning away from it.
b) From a support perspective (and to be blunt) it IS a hassle to have
to maintain two sets of infrastructure and by its nature divides your
userbase, especially those new sites that may only implement the latest
version.
c) Sometimes change is good. It's progress. If it breaks things some
people roll with the changes and some people give up.
3) Other solutions exist
a) I've heard it and seen it that those in charge of running the
services would rather have something from a company than take any
responsibility for themselves. It's the blame game. This ties in with
point #1
b) It can be argued you get what you pay for and AG is free. Sometimes
this is a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. (It's almost like
Linux vs. Windows in that regard)
4) Sometimes, videoconferencing is just not seen as important
a) Obviously, it greatly depends on your audience/target population as
to how any technology is perceived.
b) Whenever people come by to visit our area I always put my 'salesman'
hat on to demonstrate AG for the coolness it is. Sometimes people are
wow'd, sometimes they could care less.
5) "AG is just too unreliable"
a) Something that always annoys me is when other nodes screw up and
then I have a group of people locally that blame the technology. I
remember some words of Jason Bell in his SC04 presentation "An
AccessGrid meeting is only as good as your worst participant". That goes
through my mind quite a lot sadly.
b) When people have a bad experience they're already thinking of point
#3, alternatives. I don't know how many times I've heard 'oh well, we'll
try polycom if this fails'. Then sometimes they just opt for polycom
(read: anything OTHER than AG) as they don't want to take the 'risk'. I
even once suggested to a group that had had a failure that we try AG
again and got the response 'What's the point?'. Such things are very
disheartening.
c) Having to "get all your ducks in a row" so to speak is quite the
trick. Having said that, it does again tie in to point number #1 that if
things DO go south you need people around that can try different things
to make things work again. I've had to do that myself. When I've
instructed others on how to run meetings and they have a glitch, I get
the 'stories of woe' the next day.
d) Sometimes problems are just outside the node operator's control.
That ethereal bain of our existence, multicast, comes to mind. That and
firewalls. Even more hellish are places with more than 1 firewall
controlled by more than one group. Gah..
One strength that certainly puts AG above the commercial solutions
offered is the community we have. I do like the idea of having online
conferences to 'bring things together' more so than the weekly test
meetings, which and I'll be honest, I never attend unless I have a
problem or (and I thank you for this) I was invited to speak at it.
I've summarized (to some degree - I may have missed something) some
reasons why AG doesn't seem to be as well used as we (I say 'we', but of
course I can only speak for myself) might want it to be. The strengths
should also be noted in any discussion about these things. The great
features of AG are indeed the extensibility, the open source nature, the
fact it's free software on commodity PC components and, as mentioned,
the wonderful community. I certainly wouldn't want anyone reading this
to think that I've given up on AccessGrid, far from it! I will admit I
was having a 'blah' day yesterday dealing with a node for a 'test'
meeting that lasted 2 hours and although we ended up with a workaround I
was less than thrilled at how their whole attitude to AG has gradually
changed given my experiences with that site over the last 2 years of
having semi-regular meetings with them. Now, as it turned out we had our
real meeting today and everything worked great (didn't even need the
workaround) but these things can feel like a gamble.
Obviously for the problems/issues raised I don't have any great
solutions but I think it's worth noting that if we use one of our
strengths (the community) we may figure out ways to address the
shortcomings that exist.
Derek
--
Derek Piper - dcpi...@indiana.edu - (812) 856 0111
IRI 323, School of Informatics
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
