[AG-TECH] AG demonstration ideas

[Jennifer Teig von Hoffman]

Hi Mike,

Here at BU, we've run demonstrations a number of different ways. For our
standard dog-and-pony show, I usually try to get 2-3 other sites to
participate and run the demo like this:

* introductions of local and remote participants
* brief (distributed) PowerPoint presentation about the AG, encouraging my
local audience to jump in at any time with questions for me or, more
importantly, our remote participants
* question-and-answer session, steering lots of questions to remote
participants if necessary -- and it usually isn't necessary, since they
usually want to talk to the people on the screen more than they want to
talk to me. :-)

Other things which we sometimes add, which make things a bit more
interesting (depending in large part on the group involved and on the time
allotted):

* "walkaround tour" of our node, with brief explanations of the AG
architecture, multicast networking, what OSs run on the various
machines, etc
* "walkaround tour" of the Virtual Venues space, showing them the Venues
web interface and letting them watch vic and rat as you move around
* demonstration of other AG-related software, like VTK/vic, VNC, VR audio
and video ported out to the AG
* if the group visiting for the demo has a particular area of interest
(say, art and high performance computing), invite others who have interest
in that area to participate from remote sites (warn the remote sites
first!) and tailor the demo to that area of interest, allowing the
participants plenty of time to brainstorm among themselves over the AG.

There are a lot of people on this list who have done a *ton* of demos, so
I'll bet you'll get more suggestions too.

- Jennifer

On Thu, 16 Aug 2001, Mike Daw wrote:

> To open our AG node (the first in the UK!), we may well be having someone
> very important to do the unveiling. I won't mention who there is in mind,
> because obviously nothing's been confirmed (probably not the Queen, though).
> 
> At the opening, we will want to demonstrate our node. I guess other people
> must have been in similar situations and so I was wondering what others have
> done. Something that looks impressive, shows how much better AG is than
> standard video conferencing and is pretty reliable (i.e. it'll work) comes
> to mind.
> 
> We might just try to get someone important from another site who is
> appropriate to our visitor, but this sounds a bit boring and anyway we will
> probably try to do this too. (I'm thinking at the very least the director of
> one of your institutes.)
> 
> Ideas would be welcome...
> 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Mike Daw
> Computer Services for Academic Research (CSAR)
> Manchester Computing, University of Manchester
> Manchester M13 9PL, UK
> Tel: +44 (0)161 275 7026 Fax: +44 (0)161 275 6800
> Email: mike.daw at man.ac.uk
> http://www.mcc.ac.uk
> -------------------------------------------------
>