photo credit:Stefan (Flickr)

Loud and Clear!Internally Focused Digital Signage

Jeremie King & Zach PhillipsWestern Carolina University

Inception – The need for communication• A team retreat brought about the idea – We need

new ways to communicate

• The need as requested: Publicly Visible Global Availability (at least to our immediate team) Low Complexity

Turning the idea into a functional product• The idea couldn’t really be considered new if it

mirrored existing communication platforms

• The product had to stand apart from: Email Instant Messaging Phone

Initial Thoughts• Something we could display on a large screen

within our office space – 32” displays and up

• Something quick and informal – Short messages in the vein twitter

• Global access – Something web based to allow for easy transmission – Low technical requirements on the client

• Something hosted on the campus network to avoid the possibility of public access to our messages

Finding The Solution

Surely we can find something that’s

FREE$$ $$

Open source options• Lots of half baked options

• We found that StatusNet met our needs fairly closely

(http://status.net/)But didn’t work out in the end….

If you want something done right…• After a week of complaining about the open source

software market, we broke down and decided to build our own tool.

• The goals were the same as before, but with a focus on:

Readability from a distance

A focus on the final product being displayed on a large screen

Making it as easy as possible for people to post to the boards

A work in progress• This Blabber 1.0

• For our team it meets the needs that were set in our initial planning

• Blabber has been running in our organization at this capacity for about 3 months

Lessons Learned• Students really like the system

• Being public has a way of dragging people into the conversation

• Just like traditional digital signage, content is still king. However, content has different goals.

Informative – Redistribution of traditional communication Fun – Team members exchanging thoughts and ideas Open ended questions – Broadcast messaging with no obligation to

follow up

Expansion• The time to realize the initial goal was shorter than

expected

• The system was expanded with several unplanned features that make it work better in our environment

• New opportunities present themselves as good uses for the system

Future Additions• Release the project as open source on Github

• Syndication of existing content

• Mobile App

• Introduce new technologies to improve graphics/ reduce overhead

• Whatever great ideas present themselves

To us, Blabber has emerged as a form of

Social Signage

Questions?

Jeremie King – jwking@wcu.eduZach Phillips – zachphillips@wcu.edu