Software Quarterly

Talking Heads


Although real-time collaboration has been a reality since the telephone was invented, personal conferencing makes a simple long-distance call seem lifeless.

In fact, the digital revolution has made "putting the name with the face" as easy as clicking a mouse button. More and more companies will turn to desktop video- and data-conferencing to bring geographically dispersed people into contact -- and to help speed the transfer of both visual and aural information.


"We were looking for

tools that would help us

reengineer the theatre."


John Reaves, Executive Director
Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre


Consider New York City's Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre (GSRT). This avant-garde, off-off-Broadway theatre stretches the boundaries of the conventional and often naturalistic theatre experience. Everyone there is pushing the envelope of live performances and collaborative computing technology.

"Like many traditional businesses, we were looking for tools that would help us reengineer the theatre," says John Reaves, executive director of GSRT's Performance Research Workshop. "We were particularly interested in having a theatre that was complex and visual, that took a lot of chances -- something difficult to do with tight budgets."

In 1993, at an IBM-sponsored communications conference in France, GSRT participated in a transatlantic work session that demonstrated at minimal cost the benefits of workgroup computing and travel reduction.

Using Person to Person (P2P) -- IBM's collaborative data sharing and desktop videoconferencing software application -- GSRT established a real-time link between a designer in Chicago, an actor and designers in New York, and the theatre's director in France.

Reaves says all those from the theatre participating in the experiment soon were using it to hold geographically scattered production design meetings. "Person to Person has made such collaboration possible."

GSRT's artistic director, Cheryl Faver, envisions an even more remarkable future for P2P: a live theatre production that includes a real-time videoconferencing connection between two squares -- Times and Red.

Personal conferencing is poised to move in the business world, says Reaves, who is also a senior consultant at Usertech, a computer services firm in Boston. "It's just going to take off and become the key meeting enabler within and between corporations, virtual and otherwise."

See also:

People Flow

IBM WorkGroup: What's In A Name?

IBM WorkGroup Products


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