Virtual Community
The Palliative Care Symposium will be broadcasted live featuring speakers from ten different institutions in four countries. Each of the sites broadcasting will connect to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium in order to offer the Symposium to registered participants and organizations worldwide via Webcast.
If you are an individual, you can access the virtual conference from your personal computer. If you are an institution interested in hosting a group event, you can also broadcast the symposium through webcast to your group. You will need a digital projector and a computer with speakers.
It is important to recreate some of the human contact elements that are an important part of any face-to-face conference, and may be missed due to the multiple geographical locations. Connecting a face to a phone-voice or email account, conversations around the coffee-station that can lead to future collaboration, and the exchange of contact information are all important parts of any conference.
To facilitate and replicate some of the collaboration that takes place at face-to-face conferences, we've created a "virtual community" and provided some tools to let you connect with participants at other locations.
The virtual community is an on-going resource that is a valuable collaboration tool available for use before, during and after the Palliative Care Symposium.
Speaker Presentation Pages
For each presentation there is a dedicated page to facilitate comments, questions and additional feedback. This is also the place where speakers will upload their presentations, may add additional resources that are applicable to their topic and answer any questions following their presentation.
As a conference participant, you may navigate to the page (via the agenda page) after the presentation and leave any comments or questions for the speaker. You will also see the questions and comments being left by your colleagues attending from other locations.
Participant Profile Pages
When you registered for the conference an account on http://www.palliativeak.org was automatically created, along with a profile page. On your profile page, you may upload a picture, record your geographical location so you appear on the "Participant Map" and include any contact, and personal or professional information you'd like to share with the entire virtual community. You may also consider including links to personal websites, blogs, or social-media pages (like Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter).
To make comments, ask questions and access non-public areas of the virtual community you need to be sure to login to http://www.palliativeak.org.
Palliativeak.org and Social Media
Groups have been created on Facebook, Linkedin, Flickr and Twitter to integrate our virtual community with modern social-media networking tools. For those of you who already have accounts you may join the groups and for those of you who don't check back for additional information on using different social-media tools.
