[AG-TECH] Fading AG usage?

[George Estes]

Derek,

  In 2005 NCSA did 592 AG meetings for a total of 1315 hours, in 2006 we did 674 meetings totaling 1345 hours.  So the AG activity for us has certainly not decreased, but has not increased as much as in previous years.  Some of these meetings over the last year came from faculty members and researcher on campus who are just now finding out about the Access Grid and are very excited about how they can use it in collaboration with colleagues at other locations.
  We are also working on a 5 year project that will put Access Grid nodes in as many as 120 K-12 classrooms and 4 Regional Offices of Education across  Illinois.  So I think the level of interest is high it's just coming from different areas.
   Just my personal opinion, but I think many of the sites falling off the AG wagon are sites that can't, or won't for whatever reason, put forth the effort necessary to make the AG work well for them.  And then there are probably some sites that got involved during the initial excitement but now don't have enough remote collaborations to support the Access Grid.  The AG can be very high maintenance at times. :o)
   In some cases the Polycom type, H.323, systems are easier to implement for certain types of meetings.  In our AG rooms we also maintain Polycom systems and use one or the other, and sometimes both, depending on the circumstance.  


My thoughts,
George






At 02:25 PM 1/4/2007 -0500, Derek Piper wrote:

>        Hi all,
>
>        I've been part of the AG community for a while now, nearly 3 years and over that time I've not seen a lot of growth in the number of sites that we interface with for AccessGrid meetings. Quite oppositely I have seen sites that were good AG participants fall into 'disrepair' through lack of funding and site expertise.
>        A bit of a devil's advocate question, but is AccessGrid usage declining? Is AccessGrid on the way out? I've seen people turn to things such as Polycom for meetings rather than have AccessGrid meetings.
>        I'm curious to learn of other points of view on this.
>
>        Derek
>
>-- 
>Derek Piper - dcpiper at indiana.edu - (812) 856 0111
>IRI 323, School of Informatics
>Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana