[AG-TECH] Fading AG usage?

[Derek Piper]

	Hey all,

	First of all, I'm really impressed at how much effort has gone into the 
replies to the question I posted yesterday. I've deliberately not 
replied to any one person as I wanted to take time to read all the 
responses and to respond to them as a whole. I've not credited different 
people against their ideas as I don't want to forget anyone. :)
	I agree with a lot of the points made by those I have talked with 
before about this and who responded to my initial email. For many of 
these items I have simply echoed sentiments from others, interspersed 
with my own comments and thoughts.
	I think the idea to provide 'collaboration rooms' is a good one and 
something we may try and do ourselves so the facilities we have cover 
different technologies that we may need to interface with. I see that as 
the way forward.
	As to why the AG hasn't been growing as fast as before or, from some 
perceptions, decreasing in usage I guess there are these things that 
have been mentioned or that I have experienced with others. Now, I'm not 
necessarily saying these are true but they honestly are areas of 
concern. I will attempt to list/collate them point by point.

1. "AG takes support"
	a) Sometimes this aspect is least understood and when provisioning a 
collaboration environment it is envisaged that people will just 'use' it.
	b) Support is an afterthought and sometimes relegated to students - who 
then leave and mean that training has to start over.
	c) Users want to run things themselves (but need training) and having 
to involve someone to 'run' things is complication they don't want.

2) "AG keeps changing"
	a) While the current toolkit is very nice, the incompatibility between 
it and previous versions has been pointed out to me by more than one 
participant that it is a reason they are turning away from it.
	b) From a support perspective (and to be blunt) it IS a hassle to have 
to maintain two sets of infrastructure and by its nature divides your 
userbase, especially those new sites that may only implement the latest 
version.
	c) Sometimes change is good. It's progress. If it breaks things some 
people roll with the changes and some people give up.

3) Other solutions exist
	a) I've heard it and seen it that those in charge of running the 
services would rather have something from a company than take any 
responsibility for themselves. It's the blame game. This ties in with 
point #1
	b) It can be argued you get what you pay for and AG is free. Sometimes 
this is a good or bad thing depending on who you ask. (It's almost like 
Linux vs. Windows in that regard)

4) Sometimes, videoconferencing is just not seen as important
	a) Obviously, it greatly depends on your audience/target population as 
to how any technology is perceived.
	b) Whenever people come by to visit our area I always put my 'salesman' 
hat on to demonstrate AG for the coolness it is. Sometimes people are 
wow'd, sometimes they could care less.

5) "AG is just too unreliable"
	a) Something that always annoys me is when other nodes screw up and 
then I have a group of people locally that blame the technology. I 
remember some words of Jason Bell in his SC04 presentation "An 
AccessGrid meeting is only as good as your worst participant". That goes 
through my mind quite a lot sadly.
	b) When people have a bad experience they're already thinking of point 
#3, alternatives. I don't know how many times I've heard 'oh well, we'll 
try polycom if this fails'. Then sometimes they just opt for polycom 
(read: anything OTHER than AG) as they don't want to take the 'risk'. I 
even once suggested to a group that had had a failure that we try AG 
again and got the response 'What's the point?'. Such things are very 
disheartening.
	c) Having to "get all your ducks in a row" so to speak is quite the 
trick. Having said that, it does again tie in to point number #1 that if 
things DO go south you need people around that can try different things 
to make things work again. I've had to do that myself. When I've 
instructed others on how to run meetings and they have a glitch, I get 
the 'stories of woe' the next day.
	d) Sometimes problems are just outside the node operator's control. 
That ethereal bain of our existence, multicast, comes to mind. That and 
firewalls. Even more hellish are places with more than 1 firewall 
controlled by more than one group. Gah..

	One strength that certainly puts AG above the commercial solutions 
offered is the community we have. I do like the idea of having online 
conferences to 'bring things together' more so than the weekly test 
meetings, which and I'll be honest, I never attend unless I have a 
problem or (and I thank you for this) I was invited to speak at it.

	I've summarized (to some degree - I may have missed something) some 
reasons why AG doesn't seem to be as well used as we (I say 'we', but of 
course I can only speak for myself) might want it to be. The strengths 
should also be noted in any discussion about these things. The great 
features of AG are indeed the extensibility, the open source nature, the 
fact it's free software on commodity PC components and, as mentioned, 
the wonderful community. I certainly wouldn't want anyone reading this 
to think that I've given up on AccessGrid, far from it! I will admit I 
was having a 'blah' day yesterday dealing with a node for a 'test' 
meeting that lasted 2 hours and although we ended up with a workaround I 
was less than thrilled at how their whole attitude to AG has gradually 
changed given my experiences with that site over the last 2 years of 
having semi-regular meetings with them. Now, as it turned out we had our 
real meeting today and everything worked great (didn't even need the 
workaround) but these things can feel like a gamble.
	Obviously for the problems/issues raised I don't have any great 
solutions but I think it's worth noting that if we use one of our 
strengths (the community) we may figure out ways to address the 
shortcomings that exist.

	Derek

-- 
Derek Piper - dcpiper at indiana.edu - (812) 856 0111
IRI 323, School of Informatics
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana