Videoconferencing at the UW

At our informal faculty lunch this week, a few of us discussed meeting travel and some ideas on how to reduce it. Not surprisingly, one of the ideas was video conferencing. I did a little web surfing and found a recent article in Science that discusses the subject (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/318/5847/36). (I usually read Science but somehow missed this article the first time around!) It’s worth a quick scan. If you have trouble accessing it for any reason, send me an email and I will send you a PDF version that I saved.

Earlier this week, I ran across a reference to the Access Grid (http://www.accessgrid.org/), which is also mentioned in the Science article. The Access Grid is supported by Argonne National Laboratory and currently has 233 nodes in 29 countries (see map on their web site). There are 3 in the state of Washington located at PNNL, WSU, and the Chemistry Department at the UW. Nodes can be fairly simple (laptop plus camera) or pretty extensive (room with microphones, flat panel screens, etc.). I checked with the person who is listed as the Chemistry Department contact and their node is (was) a laptop plus camera that they wheeled around. Chemistry has essentially discontinued that in favor of using the Odegaard Videoconference Studio (http://catalyst.washington.edu/learning_spaces/video_conferencing.html), which can run the Access Grid software (as well as other software) and has trained staff to help out.

I am going to try to visit the Videoconference Studio to see what it is like and how available it is in terms of scheduling. I would like to encourage us to look for opportunities to use this facility and figure out how well it works for small meetings. (The web page says that it can handle up to 16 people.) It may be a way for us to participate in meetings without having to get on an airplane.