I work for a virtual company which is registered in Geneva and has its President in Tokyo, its Vice President in New Jersey and its Secretary in California. I am the Chief Operating Officer of this company and I live in Oswestry. DAVIC - the Digital Audio-Visual Council - is funded by subscription from 219 of the world's largest computer, communications and consumer companies. Their objective in working together is to be able to manage the pace of change of their hi-tech environment, and to collaborate in the production of networked multimedia products and services which will be able to be interconnected and to interoperate globally. As a founder member of DAVIC, I well remember meeting 200 people in a hotel in San Jose in June 1994 to agree the structure and the operating rules of DAVIC, while a relatively small group of people were also in the same hotel to play host to a three day teleconference of a much larger and global group of people on the Internet. Now, in similar fashion, over 400 people work regularly on the Internet, sending e-mails and exchanging files in order to create a comprehensive set of DAVIC Specifications for a complete multimedia system. The Specifications reside on a computer server in Turin, but are available to the membership via mirror sites in Ipswich, Tokyo and New York. Every three months, all these people meet face together face-to-face in a different region of the world to make difficult decisions on what their companies should collectively make in order to develop the market for high quality, real time multimedia programmes.
I worked then for British Telecom, for which this was core business. Then I left BT in 1996 to work directly for DAVIC as a private consultant - practising what we I had preached for years in an ideal situation for teleworking with laptop, desktop and Internet tools to provide e-mail and file transfer. Now the situation was very different - I was no longer protected by the resources and collective experience of a huge global player. I was hi-tech, but now high risk and potentially high cost as I used the very equipment that DAVIC was seeking to stabilise and standardise but now at my own expense and without the back up of a major IT company when things went wrong. As any IT worker using state of the art technology will know, current equipment is fragile, often over-hyped and also sold through a market structure which holds many surprises for people used to guarantees, fast service and to products with tight specification. Not without reason is the Internet said to provide only "best efforts" services.
Consequently, when I moved away from the relatively sheltered environment of BT to the freedom and excitement as a self-employed teleworker on the Welsh Borders, I was pleased to discover a local telecentre at Llangedwyn Mill in the Tanat Valley. Expected by DAVIC to meet deadlines to within hours, and potentially needing fax service or very large file transfer, Antur Tanat Cain Cyf. provided great peace of mind during the early months while I bought equipment and even afterwards as much valued insurance. Late in 1996, DAVIC decided to release its 1000 page Specifications - previously maintained just on the Internet at www.davic.org - on a CD-ROM. As COO, it was my responsibility to assemble about 50 Mbytes of text files in Turin, press a CD for evaluation in Holland, discuss this with the DAVIC Management Committee by teleconference to 12 countries and finally to give the go ahead for production and delivery of 1000 disks to the next DAVIC Meeting in Hong Kong. All this in about 6 weeks and using a lap top with no CD drive.
One copy of PC User Magazine and one week later (and £350 lighter), I owned a plug-in CD drive for my lap-top. Then, three frustrating days later I shipped the drive back to the supplier ! It was impossible to install. I then took the sample DAVIC CD-ROM to the Telecentre and read it there until I could report to the Committee what had to be done. Since then, the close presence of the Telecentre has given great peace of mind - both as an available resource and potentially as a "club" for the exchange of experience in this exciting but risky pursuit.
John Thompson
13 Feb
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