FM videoconferencing system has been progressively developed since June 2003. Its development was intially aimed at producing a useful 'in house' communication and research tool, but its popularity has led to it being used extensively and globally. All the users of FM on the KMi's research server have done so with the agreement to allow the data generated by their meeting recordings to be used for academic research, and this has generated an enormous wealth of information for study.

FM is being employed in numerous different ways e.g.

• Project Meetings - FM has been used for numerous different international projects, enabling the participants from various countries and continents, to hold frequent project meetings. These meetings can be impromtu, and reduce the time, expense and impact on the environment involved in face-to-face meetings. As an example of its use for this purpose, during 2006, FM was used by over 33 European Union funded research projects, which held over 350 meetings during that year
• Interviews - FM has been used as a tool to conduct interviews, either for the purpose of the replay reuse (e.g. the expert interview series for the EU Prolearn project) or for acquiring research data
• Lectures - FM has also been employed as a means to 'web cast' lectures, so that remote participants can follow the proceedings and particpate in question and answers e.g. the ITSA Professor Presentations
• Peer support for students. FM has been used as a tool by which students on courses can meet together to discuss and further their study e.g. students of the Animation Mentor course
• As a tool in the education of school children. FM has been used to allow children in different schools to converse, allowing both national and international meetings to take place. As part of this particular use the East of England Broadband Network (E2BN) have their own FM server
• Tutorials - FM has been used as an online tutorial tool, allowing teachers to hold group meetings with students to further discuss course work
• Social meetings - FM has been used as a means to bring together like minded people across the world to have a social chat together e.g. videoblogger meetings
• Use as a support tool for Open Content learning resources e.g. the Open University's LabSpace initiative

The impact of FM can be most clearly visualised by the geographic hit maps shown below however, for additional details please also see:

• Other impact statistics
• Testimonials - what people have said about FM

Use the links in the following table to view the attendance hit maps for other months.

Use the links in the following table to view the replay hit maps for other months.