Directed Participation

Directed Participation is a method that combines semantic web with content push technology to create a participatory situation where people take active role in a structured event, such as performance, meeting or a lecture.

The popularity of web conferencing and content sharing has been driven by a desire to increase productivity with a way to meet instantly and operate cost-effectively on digital media and electronic text from distant locations. Collaboration through remote web presence also becomes increasingly prevalent in entertainment situations such as telematic performance, multiuser computer games and participatory film and music performance events.

While most of the systems try to improve users experience by increasing the fidelity and bandwidth of the user videos, sound or graphics, an important aspect of user engagement related to planning of the joint activity is usually left out of the system design, and is determined by the personal skills of the presenter and the interest of the attendees. Increasing the level and quality of user representation through video or avatars does not solve the problem of lack of presence, since there is no way to assure that the person at the other end of the communication line is actually committed to participate in the event. This difficulty in creating a suspense of disbelief about a remote event seems to point at the importance of creating an intensive social interaction that is distributed among the attendees and yet coordinated around a common goal or theme.

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