CONIECTO

I needed a desktop sharing solution for remote presentations in 3 of the ECSCW'07 workshops. I have a whole collection of resources related to online facilitation, and I thought it will be easy.

After torturing my son (who was on vacation and got online from my apartment here in Limerick) for hours with trials of NetMeeting, Vyew, FogCreek Copilot and Lotus Sametime Unyte in the morning, I discovered Yugma - Skype.

I wanted to try it right away, and I looked around for friends who could help me. On Yahoo Messenger I found Dee, who was having trouble with her Internet connection at home in Dublin. Dee has a new laptop running on Vista. And on Skype, I found my friend Jim, from North Carolina, who's a Mac user. Both of them graciously accepted to install Yugma for Skype and give me a hand for testing it.

I shared my screen with them, and both could see what I was typing. There was a 20-30 sec delay for Jim, but it was acceptable.

Having both my friends staring at my screen, I felt a little bit like they were in my living room, and I took the chance to introduce them to each other. The funny part was that both of them could see me typing messages to one or the other before I pressed Enter:)

The next morning, I went to the Hilton and ran a complete test with Lilia Efimova, and an audio only one with Julia Kotlarski. Even if Yugma's interface is intuitive enough, we ran into trouble when I left one session and was trying to start another. I do not think it was a software problem, it's more about figuring out what are the proper steps to do this.

Fingers crossed for next week!

Labels: conference, desktop_sharing, ECSCW07, tools