ODwire.org Webinar Series

[AdminWolf]

Thanks again to everyone that attended our first ever webinar. Much to my delight, hundreds of ODwire.org members showed up! Dr. Lane and Dr. Yamane did a great job of demonstrating the benefits of OfficeMate integrated with VisionWeb.

Here is some housekeeping information about the ODwire.org Webinar Series:

* We're planning to have one webinar a month for the remainder of 2006 and 2007.

* Right now we're developing the schedule, contacting vendors and consultants to get an interesting mix of topics. If you are interested in seeing specific vendors or subjects PLEASE post your suggestions in this thread. We want to make the series as useful to you as possible.

* All webinars will be free for ODwire.org members to attend "live". Just make sure that you sign up by clicking on the "Webinars" link in the top menu & choosing the one you're interested in. We have a theoretical "limit" of 2,000 live users viewing the webinar at once.

* Archiving Issues. I've got good news, and bad news. The good news is the presentations archive wonderfully, they look crystal-clear when you play them back in media player, so we can make them available to you if you missed the live presentation.

The bad news... files are incredibly large (60MB+). There is no economical way for us to host these files at ODwire. If you do the math, you'll see that even if a fraction of ODwire.org members decided to download an archive, we'd rapidly exceed our bandwidth allotment (which could cost us thousands of dollars a month.) The excess traffic would also slow the rest of the site down.

We have come up with an equitable (if not entirely satisfactory) solution. If a sponsor is willing to cover the costs, we can post the archive on ODwire.org for any member to download.

If a webinar does not have a willing sponsor, we're going to place the archive at the Proactive Optometric Physicians site, where downloads will be restricted to POP members (including POP Buying Group Associate & Student members.)

This way, we can safely cover our costs and reduce the strain on our servers.

Again, if you attend the webinar "live", you don't need to be a POP member. So if you don't want to join POP and are really interested in a webinar topic, do your best to attend it live!

Hope that explains some of what we have planned. Please feel free to comment in this thread about all webinar issues.

adam

 

[AdminWolf]

Sounds more than fair.

Thanks, Evan. Trying to figure out what to do with the archives has been a real pain. I want to be able to share the webinar archives with everyone, but it's just not economically feasable.

When we get corporations to sponsor the webinars, i'll mention to them the idea about covering the bandwidth costs to keep the archives up & freely available. Hopefully some will, just b/c it's good advertising.

I was talking to my wife about this problem this morning. She's a fairly well-known academic librarian, and frequently gets asked to give talks and webinars by the American Library Association and other groups.

She told me that one association that she gives webinars for actually charges their members $60 per webinar to download archives (!) So apparently we're not the only ones wrestling with this problem.

At least POP membership is cheap ($39/yr for students, $49/yr for buying group associates), so hopefully this problem can be seen as a minor bump.

We're getting approached by lots of different groups now wanting to participate in an ODwire webinar, so again, if you have any suggestions for content that you'd like to see, please discuss it here! We've got a limited # of presentation slots, and I want to make certain we put on the best show possible.