Face to face meetings are exactly that; you travel some great distance to an exotic resort and have a meeting. There’s a great deal of human interaction and lots of networking while key learning and invaluable motivation is ideally had by all. Then there’s the world of the online meeting; things like Cisco’s TelePrescence, which is a sophisticated form of teleconferencing and CineMeetings and Events, which uses movie theaters to stage events where different locations can be hooked up via satellite.
Lastly, there’s the world of the virtual meeting, which, in its purest form, lets participants use avatars to attend meetings literally in cyberspace. Long known to gamers and other virtual reality aficionados, this system lets you attend a meeting presumably without even getting out of bed, if that’s your intention. Check out this video of a recent Trend Micro event in the Virtualis Convention and Learning Center of Second Life.
This is a far cry indeed from your old pipe and drape 16 projector multimedia show! Of course now I’m dating myself. Still, that means I’ve seen a lot of these kinds of changes take place over time and I can see merit in them all. The high price of travel and accommodation associated with face to face meetings, coupled with an ailing economy, has thrust some of these alternative approaches into the limelight sooner than many expected.
It remains to be seen how each evolves. I suspect that we will ultimately match the meeting approach to the specific need and that a hybrid will emerge that blends the best of the online and virtual worlds with the quintissential face to face human encounter.
