Daniel,
You are very welcome, and thanks to the WMDE team for making it all possible.
At Nikerabbit's suggestion, an excerpt from a LWN article about Ubuntu Developer Summit describing how to thoroughly encourage participation from remote & local audiences:
All of the UDS meetings are set up the same, with a "fishbowl" of half-a-dozen chairs in the center where the microphone is placed so that audio from the meeting can be streamed live. There are two projector screens in each room, one showing the IRC channel so that external participants can comment and ask questions; the other is generally "tuned" to the Etherpad notes for the session, though it can be showing the Launchpad blueprint or some other document of interest.
The team that is running the meeting sits in the fishbowl, while the other attendees are seated just outside of it; sometimes all over the floor and spilling out into the hallway. "Audience" participation is clearly an important part of UDS sessions.
-Sumana
On 05/19/2011 11:07 AM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Hi Sumana!
Thank you for this very useful summary of the feedback. That goes streight to our Lessons Learned page :)
And of course a special thanks to you and Guillome for tirelessly hacking the sessions into etherpad. And of course to Jesse Scott, who took care of the streaming. We would have been lost without you, guys!
-- daniel
On 19.05.2011 12:59, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
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