PanelPod

For the in-world symposium follow-up meeting on Eduserv Island today we are going to use an automated chairing system called PanelPod. This is an extension of my previous work on the MeetingPod, designed to virtually chair a panel session.

The system works pretty much like the MeetingPod, except that it maintains two queues of speakers, audience members and panelists, giving priority to the panelists. To take part in the session, avatars have to be seated, raising their hand (PAGE-UP) to join the queue of people waiting to speak and putting their hand down (PAGE-DOWN) after they have finished (or if they decide to leave the queue before it is their turn).

This is pretty experimental - we have only had one real test of the software so far - so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Double bollox...

Global Kids have announced their GK Lightbulb system for organising and managing meetings.

Good stuff...

I'm only slightly annoyed because it is so similar to my MeetingPod ideas, which I haven't really announced properly or made available to others.

Recently, I've been working on a PanelPod version of the MeetingPod, as system for automatically managing a Second Life panel session. We tested it yesterday in the Virtual Congress Centre on Eduserv Island and there are some glitches still to be ironed out... but the basic idea works pretty well.

Rather than a lightbulb (which I did experiment with briefly in the MeetingPod on SchomeBase) I now use different colored seats (red, amber, green) to indicate when it is OK to speak.

One major issue is that I use a system of raising your hand to join the queue. I think there are some advantages with this approach - in terms of seeing who is doing what - but one of the downsides is that avatars with animation overrides seem to cause problems for my software. I haven't worked out why.

Once I've sorted out the details, I'll make the code available... watch this space.