1	Meeting Without Meeting in Person A talk given by Tom Peters at the Missouri Library Association 2008 Annual Conference Thursday, October 2, 2008 St. Louis, Missouri
2	Maxito Ricardo, My Avatar
3	These Slides are Online! http://www.tapinformation.com/MLAtalk20081002.htm (No paper handouts. Let’s go green)
4	What Is a Meeting? A real-time interaction between three or more people for some purpose. Two people have a conversation; three or more people have a meeting. How are library-related meetings conducted? Smart aleck answer: Poorly! What technologies are used in these meetings? How many library-related meetings occur in the U.S. each year?
5	A Meeting By Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet Workgroup meeting Task Force meeting Town Hall meeting Symposium Workshop Conference Confab Happening Rave
6	Meetings, Invisible Meetings We meet so often, we rarely think about meetings as meetings (unless we become sick and tired of meetings). Almost everyone is empowered to call a meeting. Most of the time, very few people give meetings as meetings a thought There are people and resources for making meetings more productive, however.
7	U.S. Libraries and Librarians According to ALA (so it must be true): 123,291 libraries of all types in the U.S. Approx. 150,000 librarians in the U.S. My guesstimate: 350,000 total staff in U.S. libraries. We probably should include employees of library-related organizations (associations, consortia, vendors), because they often participate in library-related meetings. We may be talking about a half million people.
8	Conservative Estimates Approx. 100,000 library-related meetings each working day Some on weekends, too! Approx. 250 work-days in a year. Ergo: 25 million library-related meetings each year! Let’s think of these 25 million meetings as a market.
9	Why Think About Library-Related Meetings as a Market? It takes things to make a meeting happen. Many of these meeting things we purchase or rent. Many of these meeting things are tech-related. Therefore, there are businesses that basically are in the meeting business.
10	What Sorts of Technologies Support Meetings? Tables and chairs Flipchart technology Whiteboard technology Computers and projection devices HVAC systems Lighting systems Telecommunications systems All the Internet and WWW protocols and systems Virtual world systems
11	Let’s Try to Categorize Meeting Technologies! But first, a cautionary quote: “Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.” Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, p. 15.
12	Five Categories of Meetings In-Person (“face-to-face”) Telephone Conference Calls Video Conferences Web Conferencing Systems Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds
13	Potential Black Swan Category Bashers Instant Messaging systems that are moving toward real-time communication Twitter meetings
14	Meeting Technologies: The Great Divide In-Person Face-to-Face Not-in-Person Telephone conference calls Video conferencing Web conferencing Meetings in virtual worlds
15	An Interesting Question (I Think) If we think about those 25 million library-related meetings each year as a market, what percentage of the market (i.e., market share) does each of the five main meeting technologies currently have? Related question: What are the past trends in market share shifts, and what are the potential future trends?
16	Rough Estimates of Market Share In Person: 75 % Telephone Conference Call: 23 % Web Conferencing: 1 % Video Conferencing: less than 1 % Virtual World Meetings: less than 1 %
17	Why Should We Worry About the Market Share of Meeting Technologies? There are a lot of library meetings. Having a meeting can be quite expensive. The cost of the collective staff time may be the biggest expense. The costs of meetings are largely hidden. Ever seen a library budget that had “meetings” as a line item? There are more meeting options now
18	In-Person Meetings Good Time-honored Comfortable Most “natural” Lots of verbal, non-verbal, visual, and other information exchanged Hallway conversations Satisfies our need to gather together physically The first, and still the best Bad Often requires travel (i.e., leaving your normal workspace) Often expensive Time-consuming Onus of creature comforts (seats, temp, lighting) The 2 R’s: Refreshments and Rest Rooms An interruption to an individual affects everyone Difficult (anti-social) to multi-task Difficult to record completely and archive
19	Telephone Conference Call Meetings Good Ubiquitous technology Comfortable Not too expensive Easy now to spread the cost across all the participants (e.g., via FreeConference.com) Little or no learning curve Mute button! No shared ambient environment Bad “Thin” communication: all talk, only talk Difficult to share documents and digital content within the meeting “space” itself No non-auditory clues Sore neck; cauliflower ear
20	Video Conferencing Meetings (V-Tel, Polycom, etc.) Good You get to see people and the room where they are sitting Integration of visual and auditory information Easy to share documents Usually there is a kernel of an in-person meeting embedded in the multi-point video conference. Bad Expensive Usually still requires some travel to a video conferencing site Technology is aging
21	Telepresence Systems: Next-Gen Videoconferencing According to the Wikipedia article on this topic, “Telepresence refers to a set of technologies which allow a person to feel as if they were present, to give the appearance that they were present, or to have an effect, at a location other than their true location.” Right now, these systems are very expensive
22	Web Conferencing Meetings (Wimba, Elluminate, Adobe Connect) Good Combination of voice and text chat (2 channels) Easy to multi-task Easy to record, archive, and podcast Easy to co-browse and share documents Relatively low tech bar Can be inexpensive or even “free” Bad No 3-D Little sense of attention levels Volatile market with lots of competing players
23	Virtual World Meetings (Second Life, Qwaq, ActiveWorlds) Good 3-dimensional The next best thing to Face-to-Face meetings Bad Often a high tech bar Sometimes difficult to present and share documents Volatile market with lots of competing players Work, learning, and play all jumbled together
24	Which of these 5 meeting types should you choose for your next meeting? Quick Answer: It depends On the locations of the people who will attend the meeting On the technology available to them On their proficiency and comfort level with these technologies Do 23-things initiatives include all these new meeting technologies? On how you want to communicate and share information during your meeting On the social expectations of the meeting group
25	What I’m Not Suggesting Library-related meetings are poorly conducted. Good, productive meetings (and, ahem, the opposite) can occur in any of these 5 venues There are too many library-related meetings Tangential observation: Those meeting-free days that organizations sometimes hold are more show than substance.
26	What I Am Suggesting In this time of tight budgets and high travel costs, anyone planning a library-related meeting should explore all the options. It behooves meeting organizers to actively and thoroughly explore the 4 non-F2F meeting options. We need to collectively make the choice of meeting technology a conscious decision. Cost is one factor, but the social expectations and comfort levels of the group meeting cannot be ignored.
27	But Wait, There’s More! Although we have been concentrating on library-related meetings, many of these newer meeting technologies also can be used for innovative public programs that are not exclusively in-person. Online social networks and web-based resources like Google Docs help groups be more productive and collaborative between meetings.
28	Predicting Future Trends Lots of “combo” meetings (F2F, Virtual World, Web, etc.) Let each meeting participant decide on the meeting “mode” that best meets her/his needs. F2F and Telephone meetings will lose market share Web Conferencing and Virtual World meetings will gain market share Re: Videoconferencing: Who knows?
29	THANK YOU! Contact Information: Tom Peters TAP Information Services 6106 South Stillhouse Road Oak Grove, MO 64075 phone: 816-616-6746 email: tpeters@tapinformation.com web: www.tapinformation.com Skype: tapeters4466 Second Life and Lively: Maxito Ricardo