The Memetic Project:
Meeting Memory Technologies Informing Collaboration
The Memetic Project 1
www.memetic-vre.net
Abstract
The goal of the JISC-funded Memetic project is to create a suite of tools for meeting support
in the context of Virtual Research Environments. The approach we are taking is to:
• Work with end-user partners in a participatory design methodology, to exemplify usercentred design of e-Science tools;
• Develop tools to record and replay all or selected video streams in an Access Grid
meeting;
• Investigate the scope for automatically indexing the meeting timeline with potentially
significant events (such as slide changes, visits to websites, progression through agenda
items, or changes in speaker);
• Manually index other significant events which are too complex for automated detection
by mainstream tools (such as the raising of arguments and making of decisions) through
the use of hypermedia concept maps of interlinked ideas, argument and documents.
The Memetic project is extending and integrating
several existing tools for meeting support, which
we now introduce. We then summarise project
1
progress in its first five months.
1.
Access Grid Collaboration
The Access Grid (AG) is an open collaboration
and resource management architecture for video
conferencing, document and application sharing,
based on the metaphor of persistent virtual venues
(Figure 1).
A team of researchers collaborating in, for
example, a laboratory would expect to find there a
set of tools available to help their work; so in a
virtual venue, as well as video and audio feeds of
all participants, there also resides data, applications
and services to aid a specific virtual organisation to
work together remotely. The philosophy
underlying AG is that each group of collaborators
has their own virtual venue in which they can store
shared objects such as documents and data,
together with shared applications, perhaps to aid
1
Michael Daw, Univ. Manchester
Michelle Bachler, Open Univ.
Simon Buckingham Shum, Open Univ.
Tim Chown, Univ. Southampton
David De Roure, Univ. Southampton
Terry Hewitt, Univ. Manchester
Ben Juby, Univ. Southampton
Clara Mancini, Open Univ.
Danius Michaelides, Univ. Southampton
Rob Procter, Univ. Edinburgh/NCeSS
Andrew Rowley, Univ. Manchester
Roger Slack, Univ. Edinburgh
access to a physical resource such as a radio
telescope or electron microscope.
An AG meeting can be attended from a
full AG ‘Node’, a designed space consisting
of a large display screen and good quality,
full duplex audio; from an ‘Office’ AG node,
which can be sited on a desk; or from a single
personal computer (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Participating in an Access Grid
(AG) video conference from a personal
computer. The large central video window
shows participants in a full AG Node.
AG supports the recording of meetings
which can be played and stopped as digital
video streams. Our task in the Memetic
project is to implement and evaluate
extensions to this replay by extending the
video replay functionality, indexing it using
Compendium and the Meeting Replay tool,
and investigating means of annotating the
recording to facilitate navigation.
1.1. Arena
Arena is a tool for recording and playing back
Access Grid meetings. Given a virtual venue,
Arena can record all media streams in the virtual
venue. These can be played back into any virtual
venue. One issue with Arena is that playback may
need to be started from a location physically
different from the location where the recording
was made. In order to solve this problem, the
Arena software consists of a client (Figure 2) and a
server. The server runs on a machine that is
accessible globally. The client then tells the server
what to record and what to play back.
Figure 2. The Arena Client User Interface.
The current version of Arena only allows the
user to play back an entire meeting from start to
finish. The Memetic version will allow the user to
select a position from which to start playback, and
will feature fast-forward, rewind and pause
1.2. ScreenStreamer
The Arena recording software can only record
media streams. Generally, application sharing
software for Access Grid does not produce media
streams. As a solution to this, ScreenStreamer was
developed. This allows the user to send a copy of
their screen as a media stream into an Access Grid
session.
slides of a presentation, for example,
alongside the presenter during the play back
of a meeting.
2.
Compendium
Compendium is a hypermedia tool for
authoring and publishing concept networks
which structure Issues, Ideas and Arguments
in a discussion, linked as required to
background multimedia documents and
internet resources. Compendium is best
thought of as a knowledge management
environment for supporting personal/group
deliberations and memory, combining
hypermedia, modelling and mapping skills
(Conklin, et al. 2003). As a semantic, visual
hypertext system, Compendium provides
several ways to manage the connections
between ideas: drawing optionally labelled
graphical links between nodes (connections
in a given context); transclusion (tracking
occurrence of the same node across different
contexts); metadata tagging (enabling
harvesting of nodes with common attributes
across different contexts); and catalogues
(managing libraries of nodes and template
structures).
Figure 4 shows an extract from a Dialogue
Map created over several meetings, both
face-to-face and virtual, taken from a NASA
field trial of Compendium and the Meeting
Replay tool in support of simulated MarsEarth science teams (Clancey et al., 2005).
Figure 4. A Dialogue Map created in the
Compendium software tool, illustrating its
capabilities
for
integrating
media
resources with analysis and argumentation
from different stakeholders (in both copresent and virtual meetings).
Figure 3. The ScreenStreamer User Interface.
Other users with the ScreenStreamer software can
see this stream (Figure 3) and display it on their
Access Grid node. Arena can record and play back
this stream. This means that users can watch the
3.
Meeting Replay tool
The web-based Meeting Replay tool (Figure
5) integrates the videos, Compendium
database and other indices into the meeting.
For instance, in the NASA field trial, within a
few hours Earth-bound scientists could replay
the Mars crew’s meeting individually or
Figure 5. Example of a Meeting Replay web interface.
together over the Internet, in order to feed back on
the plans and data analysis.
Meetings can be navigated via the interactive
event timelines shown in the bottom of the frame,
or via the slide thumbnails, or from any node in a
Compendium client (e.g. to play the video at the
point when a particular argument was made). The
timelines support indices such as changes of
speaker or agenda item.
The richness of the video record thus
compensates for the terseness of the Compendium
maps; in turn, the maps and event timelines
provide hyperlinked indices into the video.
4.
End-User Participation
Meetings are central to the conduct of
organisations: there is a need to hold meetings and
record information from them and, with the
increasing use of video conferencing, often with
participation across a number of sites. As with
other interactions in everyday life, the work of
participants in making meetings run is often not
explicitly formulated or examined but is,
nevertheless, a vital resource in the design of
technologies for persistent conversation. This
obviously has implications for the design of a set
of technologies and tools that support records of
meetings as persistent conversations. How, then, to
get at this stock of practical methods for making
meetings work in order to use it as a resource for
the design of tools to enhance and possibly
transform them?
Following pioneering work on Participatory
Design (e.g. Greenbaum and Kyng, 1991), the
involvement of end-users in the design of
technologies and tools has become accepted
practice within the IT community. In the Memetic
project we have adopted ‘co-realisation’
(Hartswood et al., 2002; Buscher et al., 2002)
the aim of which is to develop technologies
and tools in co-operation with those who will
use them, and to do so over time. Following
Trigg et al (1999), co-realisation strives to
create a situation where “... co-development
of CSCW [Computer Supported Cooperative
Work] technologies ... means more than
engaging prospective users in the design of
new computer systems to support their work.
It requires that we as designers engage in the
unfolding performance of their work as well,
co-developing a complex alignment among
organisational
concerns,
unfolding
trajectories of action, and new technological
possibilities.”
4.1. Methodology
Our methodological approach takes a twin
track: first workshops with end-users and
developers, second a series of site visits to
observe meetings ‘in the wild’ linked with an
ongoing commitment to observe meetings
over time via Access Grid and to discuss
issues arising from these meetings with
developers and end-users. The initial
workshop meetings were forums for
developers and end-users to interact, discuss
the potential of Memetic technologies and
understand how these might be deployed
within each organisation in order to afford
work. Each technology within the Memetic
project was demonstrated to users and a
workshop discussion allowed users and
developers of each technology to discuss the
ways that the technologies might a) be used
within end-user organisations; b) the potential
for enhancements based on site-specific
experiences and needs.
The second track of our approach involves a
series of site visits. These involve Memetic
researchers in observing the conduct of meetings
via Access Grid. The value of these small
ethnographies lies in the familiarisation of the
researchers with the setting and the issues that
users within each organisation face – both in terms
of getting meetings organised and in using
Memetic technologies within the fabric of these
meetings. Site visits also allow the end-users to
develop what we might think of as in vivo
requirements, i.e. requirements that occur during
the meeting and which may have not been
envisaged in the workshop. During one site visit,
an Access Grid meeting involving a shared
PowerPoint presentation showed how collaborators
at a remote site were unable to navigate
consistently through the presentation and had to be
prompted by the presenting site. After the meeting,
one attendee who had been at our user
requirements workshop commented that he had
‘really thought that, yes, there’s a place where they
could use ScreenStreamer, but I couldn’t get
[remote centre] to set it up. Next time I’ll suggest
that to them’. Such realizations about the potential
of Memetic technologies are invaluable in both
designing systems that afford the work within the
user organisation and enable buy-in to the project.
5.
Project progress
The Memetic project started in February 2005, and
has been running for five months at the time of
writing. The key advances so far are:
• End-user workshops have been held with UK
end user partners in Manchester and with US
end user partners via Access Grid, with input
captured live in Compendium, which was used
subsequently to analyse the data to construct
prioritised user requirements. We are currently
undertaking a series of site visits to UK-based
end users in order to observe meetings ‘in the
wild’.
• Arena v1.0 is in testing, and version 2, with
more advanced features is currently being
developed. The more advanced version will
feature
the
aforementioned
playback
navigation, and will also allow easier
installation of the Arena server.
• ScreenStreamer v1.1 is currently being tested.
No further development will be done on
ScreenStreamer within the project.
• Compendium v1.4 (shortly to be released) now
supports the Java Derby SQL database which
enables us to distribute the tool in an
integrated installer to assist ease of setup.
• Meeting Replay can now be launched in
AG sessions for collaborative review of
recordings, and work is well underway to
simplify the generation of the meeting
metadata and indices through web forms
and integration with Compendium. Prior
to this project, replay generation required
users to hand code XML.
• A semantic web based architecture has
been designed and is now being
implemented, which will integrate all of
the above into a seamless environment for
booking,
capturing,
indexing
and
replaying an AG meeting. We have
already created an OWL ontology and set
up an RDF triplestore, which has allowed
us to successfully share meeting metadata
between components during testing.
6.
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