[Air-l] Why not make Aoir 5.0 "Virtual conference"?

[Nancy Baym]

Many people have posted links to evidence that virtual conferences 
can happen. How about telling us how much it cost to do them, how 
many people were actively involved in doing the work that made them 
happen, and how many people in the end took advantage of their being 
online to access them? What was the cost per virtual attendee and how 
was that cost covered?

At the very least, in order for it to happen you have to have:

Cameras and people to film all day in every room (or selected 
sessions if one scales down). We run 9 simultaneous sessions over 
three days. So we are talking about either hiring about 30 days worth 
of professional camera men or finding 30 days worth of volunteers to 
man the cameras. And someone is going to provide us those 9 cameras 
and all the film, right? If we had to pay just for this alone it 
would dramatically increase conference registration costs. And we'd 
then be hearing complaints about how we were disenfranchising 
potential attendees by making it too expensive.

Or else we charge to access it. Which requires password and 
registration systems. Who is going to create and manage that?

Someone to get all that material online. Again, this is something 
real people have to actually manage. Who is volunteering?

The technological and labor resources to stream or store it. Will you 
be doing that service for us?

As Jeremy has said repeatedly, if this is something you REALLY think 
AoIR should do then by all means, step up to provide the money to pay 
for it, and the labor to enact it. If you can't get it together in 
time for Chicago, take the long view and start planning now for how 
to do it in future years.

We are MEMBER driven. That does not mean that the members state what 
they want and a small group of volunteers spends enormous amounts of 
time to serve them. It means that when members want something to 
happen, those members have to make it happen and the executive 
committee will do our best to facilitate their efforts.

Please remember that not only is AoIR an all-volunteer association, 
it is a SMALL volunteer association. As President (a position for 
which I get no reduction in my real job duties and no compensation), 
my top concern is making sure that the things we can do are done as 
well as we can do them without bankrupting the association. There are 
many things we'd love to do that we can not afford to do either 
financially or in terms of labor.

I agree that the goal of having a virtual version of our event to 
accompany the face-to-face version is a good one. However, we cannot 
do it unless people who are not already among those few spending many 
hours every week to do the work for this association, recruit the 
people and funding it takes to make it happen.

Nancy

-- 
Nancy Baym 	http://www.ku.edu/home/nbaym
Communication Studies, University of Kansas
Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd., Room 102, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA
Association of Internet Researchers: http://aoir.org