B3D Webinars: Pointers and Project Status
The BID Community Think Tank is sponsoring a series of webinars as part of the B3D Workshop Initiative. The webinars are intended to be of general interest to the biomimicry, biomimetics and bio-inspired design (B3D) community. Each webinar will have a content component that is designed to provoke a spirited discussion by a diverse panel. The webinar audience can participate by posting questions and comments to the panel.
The webinars will use Google+ Hangouts on Air, a platform that supports up to 10 active participants (panelists), a large number of audience members and automatic generation of a YouTube video of the proceedings. A test of the Google+ platform identified a number of shortcomings that are solved by Business Hangouts, an enhanced version of Google+ Hangouts.
Each webinar will have an associated forum thread under B3D Webinars and will also be listed below. Comments on individual webinars can be posted to the forum thread here or on the Google+ page.
Pointers:
- B3D Workshop Initiative
- Google+ Page: B3D Common Ground Initiative
- associated YouTube channel
- additional information on the Web Platform (attachment will be updated periodically)
- 2013/11/22 B3D Webinars: Concepts and Objectives (completed and indexed)
- 2014/01/24 B3D Webinars: Workshop Planning (completed, indexed and summarized)
- 2014/02/13 B3D Webinars: Planetary Boundaries (completed, indexed and summarized)
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License
Sustainable Innovation Network 2010-2012
Webinar Platform
2014/08/07 v3 of overview document (reflects recent changes)
Attached is an overview of Business Hangouts. Support for registrations is a major improvement over Google+ Hangouts where participants had to be invited by the Hangouts initiator. Business Hangouts also supports the concept of 'viewers'. Google+ Hangouts on Air allowed 10 participants and any number of people viewing the live stream via YouTube but provided limited means for these people to ask questions or post comments (the Q&A feature provided by Google has serious limitations). Business Hangouts still limits the number of participants to ten but also supports up to 40 registered viewers who have access to the Business Hangouts user interface uncluding a Unified Chat feature.
Survey on B3D Webinar Topics
I have created a short survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/58TNX9J to get community interest and expertise in potential B3D webinars. The only required field is your name. There is also a place at the end for write-in topics. It should only take a few minutes to complete the survey.
I would appreciate your input as soon as possible - I would like to get the March webinar scheduled shortly and also develop a rough schedule for two or three months ahead.
Thanks, Norbert
Results of Survey on B3D Webinar Topics
So far, 14 people have responded to the survey which is outstanding participation. I assigned the weights High=2, Medium=1, Low/Omitted=0 and calculated averages. Metaphors vs. Analogies comes out on top based on interest+expertise with Funding in second place and Case studies/BioM Innovation Database a very close third. My plan is to focus on these three in the short term, find willing hosts and determine their availability.
We had 13 additional suggestions (a few people submitted multiples. I grouped them loosely in the following categories. I will work with the individual respondents to refine the scope and also assess what unique strengths we can bring to the discussion. Based on the results, I will incorporate these into the next survey.
Thanks again for taking the time to complete the survey!