Champions of Dimdim
Posted by Sundar Subramanian on Thu, Nov 02, 2006 @ 08:19 AM
As some (ok ok, a couple) of you would have noticed there have been no posts on this blog for quite sometime. I could say that this situation arose because we were all busy developing Dimdim into the most useable and scalable web meeting software but the truth is not so simple. We are so swamped with work (even though it does not feel like "work" with its normal connotations of forced slavery and hard labor :-)) that I go home twice in a week to replenish my "change of clothes" stock. Rest of the days I eat, sleep and wake up in office.
Yeah, in the last few weeks Dimdim has indeed grown. Many bugs have been squashed and features added. Now Attendees can join a Dimdim web meeting from any Operating System (OS) platform and browser while Presenters can use both Internet Explorer and FireFox to start meetings on Windows OS. Of course the Dimdim web meeting server has also been ported to Linux in addition to Windows. More features like two-way audio & video and recording & archiving will also be released soon.
Many early adopters have also started using Dimdim including two instances of Dimdim being used in a conference setting. Of course, in these initiatives it is the Champions of Dimdim, people like Julian Ridden (contributor and evangelist in the Moodle community) and Moira Hunter (who combines the best of technology and language teaching in Europe) who have taken the initiative. In the Sydney Moodle Conference organized by Julian, Dimdim was used in two modes: Kiosk mode with roving Presenters and Presentation mode with numerous Attendees. In the Weblearning with the Human touch event organized by Moira there were more than five interactive Dimdim workshops. Through these events many early adopters of technology used Dimdim and gave us invaluable feedback and we got a much better idea of how Dimdim scales across many users and multiple simultaneous rooms. Universally users liked the browser based working of Dimdim which removes the need for installation and configuration of the product. Also almost everybody felt the need for two-way audio and as soon as we got this feedback our engineering team started work on two-way Audio & Video so that attendees can also talk back during the web meeting. I want to express my heart felt gratitude to Julian and Moira for being patient and working with Dimdim to make both the events much more interactive to the attendees.
Ps: A big thanks to the readers who pointed out through emails the validation of the point expressed in this post of mine due to the 1.65B$ acquisition of YouTube by Google.