Today Sinclair Library (where I work – the music/audio/video library on campus) hosted a screening of Lawrence Lessig’s “Wireside Chat”, a lecture about open video and copyright reform and fair use. The lecture itself took place at Harvard Law School, where Lessig is a professor, but it was streamed live worldwise, via open-source codecs. We joined groups in Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico, the U.K., Frans, India, Canada, and the U.S. mainland to watch the lecture and participate in a question and answer session. It was Darn Cool.
I was one of the main organizers of the screening at our library, and it was a good learning experience. I worked with some of the publicity, getting announcements out to various mailing lists on campus and highlighting the event on Sinclair’s Facebook page. I helped plan the food, test the technology, and even figured out how to project the Twitter #wireside feed to the side of the main lecture so we could what people were saying and asking during the talk.
A few observations:
-There were some technical difficulties on the Harvard end. The video feed was pretty low-quality, even though as a “registered” venue we had access to a private, higher-quality feed. They also started late, which I think was connected to feed issues. We didn’t really mind (more time to eat and chat!) and really, I think it made a lot of us feel better – even HARVARD has problems sometimes!
-An awesome crew of helpers can definitely help make an event . . . well, awesome. I had three or four people helping me (student workers and other staff) whose competence I had complete trust in. And this made SUCH a difference. No running around like head-less chickens for us!
-This was the first event I’ve been at with a Twitter “backchannel” projected alongside the main show. Overall I really liked it, though I can see how it might get distracting if I got so involved in the backchannel conversation that I lost track of what was going on in the main talk. I was happy to have the chance to show a group of people at UH how this could work.
-The talk was great. Lots to think about, and lots more I need to learn about.
