# Videoconferencing: Help me spend someone else's money! **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 21, 2008, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/videoconferencing-help-me-spend-someone-elses-money/468925 "2008-10-21T18:53:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Priam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/77aa72/32.png) [@Priam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Priam)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2008, 6:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/videoconferencing-help-me-spend-someone-elses-money/468925/1 "2008-10-21T18:53:11Z")
I’m currently employed for a small regional psychological training center that is looking into options for webcasting and videoconferencing to improve our outreach into the surrounding area. Due to being the only non-raving technophobe, the initial brainstorming for this has been left to me… which doesn’t make me particularly qualified. I’m hoping against hope that somebody here might be! To give a quick rundown of what we’re looking for the setup to do: 1. Allow students from around the region to log-on and participate in classes in real-time. This may or may not include the ability for them to webcam themselves into the class rather than participate via a chat client. It’s VERY important that the quality of the video stream to them be as top-notch as possible, since they consider body language a high priority (remember these are psychologists!). 2. Possible to use for committee meetings with members who cannot make it in. 3. Record and archive classes/presentations for future use by members. We’ve got a building fund that this could potentially come out of, so consider the price cap to be somewhere around $10,000 for the initial purchasing. What hardware/software/training would be involved with this? Appreciate any thoughts you could give me!