Background

While people attend presentations, panels, and lectures to learn something from the people at the front of the room, there's a lot of potential for creating spaces where audience members can interact with each other and the people presenting. This project focuses on augmenting the physical space of the auditorium to provide a venue for the audience to ask (and filter) questions for presenters. This approach also makes it easy to engage audience-members who might not be in the auditorium, but who are participating on the web, in an overflow space, or in an environment like Second Life.

Paper

We presented a poster about Backchannl at CHI2008. You can also read our paper describing the project and our experiences deploying it in conferences.

Design

backchan.nl is a simple web-based tool that allows audience members to identify themselves, post questions, and vote on other people's questions. The current top questions are projected at the front of the room so that the audience can see them, as well as shown on a monitor visible to presenters. Upcoming posts are shown to users participating on the web, but not on the main screen.

Posts are ranked based on a metric that rewards positive votes and a high fraction of positive votes out of total votes. Older posts tend to lose points, so new questions can quickly rise to the top of the board. Moderators can also dismiss questions once they have been answered to make room for new questions. After each session, the board is cleared to make way for new questions.

While this approach is heavily inspired by sites like Reddit and Digg, its integration in the physical space for specific kinds of events sets it apart.

So What?

While this work is in its very early stages, we think it suggests a number of interesting approaches both to choreographing events in physical space as well as creating a single mediated venue that can be open both to co-located audiences as well as remote audiences. For events, we think this approach demonstrates how important it is to represent the backchannel in the space itself. By displaying top questions to the audience, presenters, and moderators, the system clearly privileges audience participation; the system is a clear channel to people running the event, which gives it legitimacy. It also keeps participants honest. By making the discourse in the backchan.nl tool part of the public experience, it gives it a clear purpose and role. Beyond the physical space, the system provides participants in other locations with as much access to presenters as people in the room itself. Furthermore, by encouraging people both in the room and beyond it to use the same system, no one group is privileged over any other. This is in contrast to many other tools for remote participation, in which remote participants are routinely marginalized because of poor representation in the physical space, and the hassle of using the tools that involve people outside of the physical space.

Status

backchan.nl is still pretty rough. We've deployed it at three events so far, and are always looking for new places to use it. If you would like to use it at an event you're organizing, please get in touch. Setup is still a pretty custom job, so we would need some advance notice and will need to be somewhat involved in the details of deployment. Hopefully in the future, it will be easier to deploy to different venues.

A similar tool has been developed by Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet for Internet and Society. It's available on SourceForge as QuestionAnswer.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, I can be reached at dharry at media . mit . edu.