On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Andrew Garrett <agarrett(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 8:29 AM, Happy-melon
<happy-melon(a)live.com> wrote:
"Steven Walling"
<steven.walling(a)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(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
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(a)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