ICANN São Paulo meeting site

It is comparatively easy - in theory - to make presentations available ahead of time.

The break is always but always human. People have presentations on USB fobs, or on their laptops, and the first a meeting organiser may get hold of it is seconds before the person starts to speak.

Even accounting for that, there are two issues in getting presentations up on this site.

1. Do people know this website exists?
2. How do you upload the file?

ICANNWiki is much better known than this site for the simple reason that it has been up for a year (?) now, and this site has been up for two days. ICANNWiki also lets people post up presentations - and has done for ages.

The fact is that people don't know about it, or don't see it as worthwhile enough to go out of their way. But it is used - I remember Paul Stahura sticking up his domain long tail presentation up on ICANNWiki in Marrakech because of the demand for it.

The second point: this site has been set up so only authorised users can upload files, for obvious reasons. It is possible to set up a system to make this uploading process safer but that requires adding a few filtering policies and there hasn't been time to agree and implement them.

However, there is a solution: ICANN staff and Supporting Organisation chairs should be able to upload presentations, so if you can get it to them, and point out where best to place it, there is a way of doing it.

If people find getting presentations up is something that is very useful, I'm sure a system will quickly develop. That is the point in part of running this pilot site - to experiment and see what works, what doesn't, and what changes to make.

Kieren

It would be nice if the webcasts were in different formats other than the usual RealPlayer. Or, convert them into Flash later, like on YouTube or Google Video.

George Kirikos
Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc.

Hey George,

I agree with you but having tried to do exactly this a few times, I can tell you it's not that easy.

Video formats are still not very good at switching between one another. You may not be able to tell the slight loss in quality you get when you move audio files but it is 1,000 times more obvious with video because of its complexity.

The first thing in shifting formats is that the audio is out of sync with the picture - which is incredibly distracting. But also frames stick, or break, and the picture breaks up.

The other big issue is software and hardware. Decent video editing software isn't cheap and requires some expertise, plus you need a good machine with plenty of RAM and lots of hard disk space. And then there is getting hold of the files in the first place - video files, especially those not optimised for the Web, are huge and that adds a whole level of transportation problems.

It can all be done of course, it's not rocket science, but it does require a dedicated person who knows what they're doing and who have access to all of the above.

As for YouTube - you are restricted to 10 minutes unless you sign up for a Director account. Even if you do sign up for a Director account, the other big issue with video is breaking it up into editable chunks. The fact is that no-one bothers to sit and watch a two-hour session.

What actually has to be done is a content professional needs to go through all the content, then decide where to break it up, and then produce some written content and attach it to the file so people know what is on the video (and if it has timestamps for when people appear or discuss particular matters then it become really useful). And then they need to make the video available in a number of different formats at different sizes, both streaming and downloadable.

This all takes time and is expensive. Personally, I think it would be great if ICANN did this for its meetings but I can also see the easy counter-argument: it is a lot of time, money and trouble for what will probably be a very small audience.

That said, an archive of ICANN meetings would be a great resource for the future.

Sorry, I've gone on a bit - but I have look at this quite a bot so I thought I'd share my thoughts.

Kieren