Share, Collaborate, Create Virtual Conferences

Abstract

Introduction Considering the worldwide economic and political panorama, some countries and institutions can not afford to or will not incur the expense of sending delegates to real conferences. VCG is an alternative, reducing the physical and temporal distances between members of a particular area of knowledge and enriching and promoting new virtual communities by creating the opportunity for expert discussions and interactions. It also offers advantages such as reduced operational costs and increased frequency of content updates, therefore improving the quality and amount of available content. The most valuable asset of a knowledge portal is this content, and as it must be frequently updated, management tools allow for a focus on content generation. As well, the automation of content management processes increases the productivity of non-technical contributors; these contributors should be able to use and submit content in a flexible way, without technical bottlenecks (Arboleda, 2002). This is very important for time-sensitive environments and customerdriven portals. One of the goals of the medical school at our university is the diffusion of medical expertise and the use of technology to create an easily accessible knowledge base for members of the health care community. The expert knowledge we are particularly interested in is tropical disease. The availability of information and communication technology and CAIBCO'S expertise in the diffusion of biomedical knowledge has promoted the ongoing development of Axis, a knowledge portal specialized in and for the iberoamerican (Latin America and Iberian) biomedical community, which is also open to health care students and professionals worldwide. The services offered include web sites on medical specialties, documentation and publication of tropical and emergent pathologies, access to digital publications (particularly the biomedical electronic publication VITAE http://caibco.ucv.ve/vitae/), interactive tools such as a virtual conference tool, epidemiological information, links to scientific and medical societies, research organizations, hospitals, medical services and sites of interest. Initially, VCG was considered a low-priority service to be provided by Axis. However, the priority of the tool changed from low to high when a researcher from another organization was looking for an existing, user-friendly tool she could use to set up a virtual conference. Our main challenge was the development of a tool to satisfy the needs of a community of different levels of researchers and to be used for networked-based tools such as e-mail and web-based applications. The development was aimed at the publication of ongoing research and clinical cases as the bases for discussion between researchers, mirroring the basic model of conferences. VCG imitates the processes involved in live conferences and reproduces diverse scenarios for the set up and publishing of virtual conferences. The format and workflow was chosen to approximate that of live conferences, where papers are presented and debates follow. With VCG these debates need not be limited by the typical time constraints of live conferences. When a virtual conference is over, all contributions remain on the web as permanent resources. The focus of this work is the presentation of our tool and its subsequent application to an actual virtual conference organized for the benefit of a specific research community. Virtual Organizations--Virtual Conferences Diverse authors have presented definitions of a virtual organization (VO), analyzing its nature, causes and impact on society. A structural definition of VO can be found in Whittaker, MacKinnon, & White (2001): All current research appears to agree that the virtual organization is technologically centered, involves electronic telecommunications links to exchange information or knowledge and removes many of the limitations inherent in hierarchical organizations. …