My first Skype conference

A few months ago, I participated in a conference for the first time via Skype. I definitely wanted to go, but it turned out to be too complicated and costly. I was going to cancel despite having prepared a paper, until I suggested the possibility to the organizer who kindly accepted. This was as new to the host as it was to me, but we decided to give it a try. The conference was an all day event. I was up very early because of the time difference, so we could do a sound and image check with the technician. Set up was easy, and as the conference began (this was a workshop type of event), I was introduced to the other participants as someone who was going to be in the room virtually. Eventually, my turn came, and I did my presentation as best as I could from my office desk with my image projected on a screen via videoprojector (a little Orwellian, maybe).
Overall, this was clearly a mixed experience, although I'm glad I tried it, and got many things out of the conference.

On the good side:

• At least I diid not miss out completely. I could hear other participants loud and clear, and got a clear sense of where debates were going. I almost did not miss a thing.
• The other participants heard my paper and I probably managed to get a few ideas accross

The cons, however, are quite many:

• I was there but I wasn't there. It's not just that I did not get to discover Boulder, Colorado, it's that I essentially missed on all of the things that make conferences interesting and fun. By that I mean the sheer pleasure of meeting colleagues, interacting with them, and learning about their work. Maybe a slightly different configuration could have yielded more in that respect, but I can't imagine the participants carrying the laptop around with them during coffee breaks just to keep me in the loop. They didn't and I don't blame them. Maybe one day if handheld devices can carry a clear videoconferencing signal, but even then.
• There is another problem to not being present, which is attention deficit. Here I was, watching a conference all day, but from the privacy of my office and, subsequently, home. The distractions were many, and it wasn't as if anyone at the conference would have noticed (I suspect after a while the screen saver turned on, and I was just drowned in an aquarium of slow moving sea creatures). It's harder to be distracted at a conference where you will at least occasionally make eye contact with the speaker.
• There were several little technical problems, which turned out to be quite fundamental. One of them is of course that the camera at the conference was static. This was especially frustrating during question and answer sessions, sort of like wearing a virtual corset since I could not look around and see who was asking the questions. That deprives you of a lot of contextuality and understanding of the dynamics at stake. I know logitech has a camera that will track sound or movement, but I think the ideal would be for remotely controlled cameras (after all, I want to be doing exactly what I would normally be doing in a conference which is to gaze around freedly). This sounds really simple, but a thorough Google search yielded no results, so I'm assuming the product doesn't exist, at least not in a mass produced and commercially available way.
• After long periods, Skype will often stop. That created some minor awkwardness. Should I ring into the conference to tell them that I have been disconnected and ask them to accept our video conversation? Is the sound on and will I interrupt the speaker? Then there is the complex etiquette of not signalling that you have been cut off and waiting for someone to realize that is the case. Will people think that I was not interested in listening in the first place, that I was in fact quite happy to be disconnected? I think these questions of virtual etiquette still require some substantial thought.

Anyhow, to conclude, I was reasonably happy with the experience and I would do it again if this was a conference I really wanted to attend but couldn't. However, and quite predictably, this is really no substitute for human presence at this stage, and in fact doesn't come close to a proper conference experience.