On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah@wikimedia.org
wrote:
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.
That's a great way to run certain kinds of planning or "present cool idea & brainstorm about it to find cool things to start working on" sessions.
It seemed a lot of our sessions this time around were kind of halfway between that style and either an open-room presentation or a small intense workgroup; I think with a little better room/group separation for some of the break-out groups we make more of them work like that and be more inviting to remote participants.
Particularly if we can coordinate a little better with some of the additional groups like the Language Committee & Wiki Loves Monuments people -- as some folks said on-site the langcom folks seemed to be a bit more aggressive about coming over and grabbing devs for questions & comments (hi GerardM! ;) than the WLM folks, and we'd probably benefit from a little explicit session time with both groups. Scheduling a brief breakout session & letting the remote folks have the chance to show up for it too can help here over just the ad-hoc connections we make person-to-person.
Etherpad's a particularly nice medium for the group note-taking since you tend to end up with two or three people each sort of half-covering the session in notes, and they can fill in for each other as attentions wander to and from specific parts of the conversation. It also gives remote participants a *direct* way to interact -- "what was THIS about? can you clarify THAT?" -- before the on-site participants lose their context and end up unable to clarify the documents.
Anyway long story short -- super great meetings, and I think we're well on our way to figuring out how to do a fun & productive hackathon. Thanks to everybody at WMDE, WMF, and the Beta Haus who helped make it a reality this year!
-- brion