1. Loud and Clear!
Internally Focused Digital Signage
Jeremie King & Zach Phillips
Western Carolina University
photo credit:
Stefan (Flickr)

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Finding The Solution
Surely we can find something that’s
FREE

6. 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….

7. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

19. 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

20. To us, Blabber has emerged as a form of
Social Signage

21. Questions?
Jeremie King – jwking@wcu.edu
Zach Phillips – zachphillips@wcu.edu