Yesterday I participated in my very first webinar. Webinars are a type of web conference where one person (possibly with a small team of helpers) is presenting on a topic to a large but self-selecting group (registration is usually involved in order to participate in a webinar). The presenter usually is running a slideshow of some kind with verbal commentary. The participants may patiently and passively take in the presentation or get involved directly by asking questions orally (if their microphone is unmuted) or through a question text chat window. Most webinar facilities provide for recording of the session by the organiser. And that's exactly what happened during Karen Schneider's webinar entitled Understanding Open Source.

Karen's webinar was a gentle introduction to what open source software is and why it is important for libraries. There were 64 people attending the webinar presentation most of whom, I would guess, were new to open source. The atmosphere was very friendly (all due to Karen) and that encouraged questions both directly and through the question text window. I found the questions asked to all be sensible, probably a sign that this webinar had found the audience for which it was intended.

I had intended to merely be a spectator at this webinar. But when the numbers of participants grew to a substantial size well in advance, Karen posted a request on the Evergreen general discussion email list for volunteers to help with the webinar. So I volunteered.

Helping out meant that my status was changed when I logged in from participant to one of the organisers in the webinar. Thus I was able to see more and do more than a typical participant. For example, I was able to mute or unmute the microphones of other participants. I was able to directly answer questions in the question chat window. I had other powers as well, but those were the ones employed during the 1 hour presentation.

I would have been happy to leave it at that and just help out in the background, but Karen kindly solicited input from her two "wingmen", myself and Jason Etheridge, during her talk. So if you go to the recording published on the Evergreen blog and listen to it all the way through you will periodically hear my sonorous tones.

Participating in a webinar was lots of fun. It didn't take more time than the hour advertised for the talk, and I didn't have to get on a plane and travel for 8 hours in order to hear Karen speak. I imagine that all of the librarians participating in the webinar were also sitting at their desks in their libraries. Which brought a wonderful image to my mind of librarians across North America all focusing their attention on free and open source software at the same time :-) 

That's what I'd like to see happen across the eIFL.net countries as well. Maybe webinars will be the way forward.