Web Conferencing Encourages Communication in Unlikely Ways

Soliya offers group polling capabilities, a virtual white board, and streaming video from external sources.

Some topics are difficult to broach at any time. Politics and religion have that special ability to send blood pressure soaring. That’s why the tech-savvy professionals at Soliya: The Connect Program, are using next-generation Web conferencing technology to foster new ways of communicating. Their special mission is to help bridge the divide between the West and the Arab and Muslim world.

Web conferencing is nothing new, the big news is that this method is working, and the results are quantifiable, creators say. Lucas Welch, co-founder of Soliya, an Internetbased video conferencing and collaboration platform, explains, “The key is to bring diverse people together to interact.”

If that’s the key, we might have sworn that the Internet opened the door to cross-cultural communication over a decade ago. Welch insists that the Soliya, a semester-long program he launched with Liza Chambers in 2003 to facilitate dialogue between college students at 60 universities worldwide, is different from other online forums.

Soliya’s Web conferencing application deploys existing technologies to create the Soliya experience.

So, what makes Soliya unique? Welch says it’s a combination of highly trained discussion facilitators, a conscious curriculum, and a cutting-edge Web conferencing application.

The software fosters a space where strangers from around the world feel comfortable discussing uncomfortable subjects, without sidestepping controversy.

“We looked at commercial [video conferencing] services, but none of them met our design requirements,” says Welch. Soliya employs aspects from different “smart [Web conferencing] systems that incentivize the ethos of constructivity.”

Constructive engagement of conflict is challenging enough in a face-to-face encounter. In order for the online forum to be a safe space for participants with varying English language and bandwidth capabilities, the technology had to work through some complex considerations. In the effort to change the world, it’s important to “maintain an almost delusional belief in your dream, but also have a very real, practical understanding of the constraints,” Welch said in an interview with Social Edge.

The founders signed on interactive application development companies Cainkade and Metaliq to build an application with responsibilities that, until now, most people haven’t associated with technology developers. The user experience was prioritized.

Soliya’s mission is to bridge the divide between the West and Arab and Muslim world through innovative Web collaboration.

Chambers and Welch wanted an application that could support a non-hierarchical discussion between four “Western” students, four “Middle Eastern” students, and a discussion facilitator from each hemisphere. In a setting where inclusive input and equality is key, a gridded video conferencing layout wouldn’t do.

Arranging participant video images in a circle is more conducive to a non-hierarchical community setting. As students enter and exit, the circle’s diameter adjusts so there is never an empty space, regardless of group size. While participants speak aloud in real time, a central text-box is a useful back-up tool for the multi-lingual students.

In consultation with the tech professionals from Cainkade and Metaliq, Chambers and Welch had to decide which special features they should, and logistically could, include. Regardless of varying connection speeds, “we wanted everyone to have a rich media experience,” Welch remembers. They had to prioritize: video or audio? They could have good clarity in both, or excellent clarity in one at expense to the other. Faces and expressions are important to the visceral experience they wanted to create, but clear verbal communication is indispensable.

The flash-based application streams lowres video and prioritizes audio with a “talk button,” which users hold when they want to stream their audio. Originally developed to avoid overloading the server, Soliya elected to keep the feature after bandwidth speeds improved because it helped facilitate thoughtful listening.

Soliya uses technology available today with a goal to continue improving the program software as technology improves. Since its 2003 inception, the Soliya Web conferencing application has incorporated technological functions such as group polling capabilities, a virtual white board, and streaming video from external sources, enabling a group to watch and discuss relevant media together in real time. Employing new technologies is an ongoing project.

Though Soliya participants communicate in English, Chambers and Welch have not ruled out the possibility of enhancing technical capabilities that would allow non- English speakers to participate. Says Welch, “We’re keeping a close eye on Meedan,” a social technology company whose online network employs Arabic/English translation services through a collaboration with the IBM Transbrowser. The Meedan network, which boasts a growing translation memory of over 3.2 million words, allows users to create profiles, post news articles, blogs, and user comments in one language and automatically see a translation in the other via Machine Translation (MT) and Machine Augmented Translation (MAT) softwares. MT substitutes words; MAT can recognize phrases, idioms, and syntactical patters through advanced computational linguistics. Meedan’s professional and volunteer translators improve the quality of the MT to promote cross-language interactions online.

Soliya emphasizes the role of the media in shaping viewer’s perceptions of specific issues, and provides students with the tools to develop their own media.

While Soliya and Meedan have comparable missions, the technologies they use to fulfill them are as diverse as the users they connect. Soliya groups meet for 18 hours over the course of an academic semester to connect in real time discussion. Trained facilitators, diverse media sources, and a flexible discussion curriculum tailored to fit each group, help them explore issues in-depth, including those of culture, politics, economics, foreign policy, media, religion, and conflict.

It’s a big project, but Soliya ’s track record of accelerated advancement and swift substantiation of its capacity for global impact has turned heads, including those at the U.N.’s Alliance of Civilizations Media Fund. The recent partnership with the UNAOC inspired Soliya’s newest program, Terana, designed to enable selected fellows to create and share media about their communities through social and mainstream media networks. Al Jazeera and ABC networks got involved before the fellowship candidates were even selected.

Seven years after its inception, Soliya is featured on the resumes of video journalists; Web designers; media, communication and technology managers; and AV technology developers. With over 2,600 alums from 25 countries, the Soliya reveals the formidable market for peace-building technologies that has caught the attention of AV and IT developers worldwide.

Yesterday’s “Transformers” were known for reshaping society with dogged creativity, but today’s industry professionals are testing the boundaries of technological impact. By harnessing the power of today’s technology and the expertise of Cainkade and Metaliq, Welch explains, Soliya has “a much higher return on investment.” Generating brand new technologies is expensive and uncertain in an uncertain world. “We need to think about the social implication of our technologies,” affirms Welch. “That’s where we invest.”

CAINKADE: cainkade.com
METALIQ: metaliq.com
SOLIYA: soliya.net
U.N. ALLIANCE OF CIVILIZATIONS MEDIA FUND: unaoc.org

Virginia Rubey is a writer and researcher for AV Technology magazine.