On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 8:29 AM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
"Steven Walling" steven.walling@gmail.com wrote in message news:BANLkTi=TGX+f01W6bjftqO40ORtOuBDa-w@mail.gmail.com...
On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 12:43 PM, Guillaume Paumier gpaumier@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Setting up the live video feed isn't easy, and taking notes in real time is pretty time- and energy-consuming, but we can make efforts to continue to do it in the future, if it's worth it. We'd just like to know how useful it is.
The EtherPad notes were especially useful for me. The live video was less useful because of the time difference. The videos after the fact are fun, so if it was a combination of notes and post-produced videos I'd be happy.
Thanks for all the hard work on documentation. It sure was nice to read the blog posts as you all went along.
Steven
Being in a similar timezone avoided that problem for me, and it was a welcome distraction from RL to watch some of the videos; but I didn't gain anything particular out of it being live because there was no obvious way to interact back. Admittedly I was hampered by being unable to use IRC, but were people on it 'live' during the event? I was tempted to drop a question onto the EtherPad and see if anyone picked it up.
I suspect that there actually was a reasonable amount of scope for remote interactivity, just that it wasn't as obvious or well-advertised as it could have been. But since the only advantage to *outputting* media feeds in real-time is if remote viewers can *input* straight back, that's something that would be worth consolidating in the future.
I was only really available for the Tech Days, so I guess it's a bit different. However, I dropped in and followed the conversation. It wasn't particularly clear what I was supposed to do with my opinion — the etherpad is generally considered a record of what was said in person, and I wasn't necessarily comfortable adding my own thoughts in there. At the same time, I had mixed results asking questions in the etherpad chat.
So I agree with HM that, while it was pretty easy to follow what was going on (and I have to give big props to the people who set it up like that), it wasn't too obvious how I could actually contribute to the discussion.
-- Andrew Garrett Wikimedia Foundation agarrett@wikimedia.org
Thanks for clarifying, Andrew and Happy-melon. I've thought of a few things we could have done, but were often too busy directly taking notes to do:
* Ensured that the speakers actively asked for questions _from IRC and remote participants_ * More consistently & explicitly asked for questions via IRC and Etherpad
Happy-melon, I do believe that posting to wikitech-l is a way to tell people who are actively seeking MediaWiki-related information -- after all, they chose to subscribe to the list! But I take your point. For next time:
* Include "we want your remote participation, here's how" summary at the *top* of the hackathon's canonical page -- in this case, at mediawiki.org
With folks in the #mediawiki IRC channel, I've also developed some additional lessons learned/TODOs for next time:
* Need multiple dedicated notetakers (1 is not enough during quickly-moving discussions) PLUS a person to actively monitor IRC/Etherpad/Twitter and explicitly ask for questions and comments, plus probably another for backup/relief. (Wikimedia's Germany chapter had attempted to recruit more local hackers as notetakers and couldn't get them -- perhaps next time!) * Etherpad makes it unclear how to ask questions -- chat? main body of the text? Consider a dedicated Etherpad for Q&A, or templated areas within the notes set aside for questions * Encourage other people at the conference to get on IRC & Etherpad and respond to the questions and comments from remote participants * Consider dedicating discussion time, possibly after each batch of speakers, for questions and comments from remote and in-person participants
I'm glad it was easy to follow what was going on from afar! So it sounds like this was definitely an improvement over past hackathons in this respect. Next time: better interactivity. Thank you for the bug reports.
Best, Sumana Harihareswara