I have talked to Bill about this a couple of times now and I am sure many others have had this discussion but it appears nothing has ever been done. I'm going to get it worked out
I have some thoughts, ideas, and I think a solution but I will need some volunteers to help out with the testing of this.
Here are what I see as the primary objectives in order of importance-
-Provide live and recorded audio and video feed of presentation in the Library.
-Allow for interaction between speaker and online participants
-Ability to switch to computer screen / slides
There are a number of services that you can use for this kind of deal. Fortunately google was nice enough to make an under utulized social media platform known as google+ which offers everything we need for free. Best part is it automatically uploads the feed to youtube. I believe it will provide all of the functionality I listed - if not it is a good free starting point.
My thought is that we start out simple and we can get more fancy if need be, based on participation and feedback. Regardless of how we do this we are going to need to have some people trained to act as moderators. It will be too much to ask for the presenter to present to an audience and manage the online audience. What I am thinking is we set up one of the new young eagle lap tops on one of the desks in the front (to give a first person view). The moderator will control the camera and field questions or comments. Users will have to create a google+ account - I do not think that is to much to ask.
As far as camera / equipment goes I think to get started all we really need is a webcam - that is what they are made for. They are inexpensive and we can procure one locally. It may become necessary to get a wireless lapel microphone for the speaker to wear if the audio feed sounds to distant. This costs money ($130), will isolate the online audience from the live audience, and it is another thing to break or run out of batteries.
That said, I need some volunteers to participate in a mock run - hopefully this weekend. This will probably amount to a few of us going over to the hangar this weekend with our laptops and just set up a mock event and play around with it until we have a setup we like. I have never used this before so I would like to make sure we work out the bugs. I'm hoping Jeff or someone who attends IMC meetings will join in this as I know there is interest from them and I think this will be particularly valuable for there meetings.
Please let me know if you are willing to help out / participate.