Pinging Brendan Campbell regarding this conversation, in light of the discussion about technologies for meetings.
Also, a general comment on meetings: I prefer that if there's text conversation, that it stays all in one place and in a channel that is archived by WMF (currently that solution is IRC), and not in the Google Hangouts chat, and especially not in both places (which requires people who want to be aware of all text conversation to watch both Google chat and IRC.)
Pine
On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 10:04 PM, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 9:55 PM, bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 8:06 PM, Legoktm legoktm.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On 03/09/2017 08:17 AM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
- NOTE: we plan to experiment with having a public HANGOUT meeting,
instead of
using IRC.
Can I ask why? At least for me, Google Hangouts simply isn't an option to participate when I'm in a crowded library/classroom.
+1 to this being inconvenient. I don't always attend arch com meetings, but usually do if I happen to be online during the time. If its a hangout, it is extremely unlikely I would attend unless I was specifically proposing an RFC.
Yeah, this makes "opportunistic" participation a lot harder:
- when I am borderline interested in the topic, I can multitask between IRC
and other tasks, and read scrollback every couple minutes. This is not really possible with video - either I spend an hour to participate (that's about 2.5% of my total time if I spend a paid hour so not a trivial cost) or I don't participate at all.
- when something is not interesting / relevant enough to participate, I can
skim the logs afterwards in way less than an hour, or search them for keywords. Neither is possible with video.
- when I don't think the topic will be relevant to me but it turns our
otherwise, I get a ping when someone on IRC says my name or a keyword I've set highlighting for. There is no such thing on Hangouts (I guess people can still be pinged on IRC but joining into an already ongoing video chat is awkward as there is no way to read back what has been said in the last few minutes).
Even more problematically, it breaks public archiving of ArchCom discussions as hangouts invariably tend to become a mix of talk and typed comments, and while it is possible to publish the video stream on YouTube, as far as I know it is not possible to preserve the comments (or even read them back if you join late) so things like links and side-channel clarifications will get lost. Also, IRC logs are indexed by Google (this has helped me multiple times in the past) while automated voice transcribing technologies are not quite there yet. Also also, the meetbot generated an automated summary which was not great but somewhat useful. With video meetings, will anyone take up the burden of writing a similar summary by hand? (The private ArchCom meetings have decent notes, but those seem to be done by a dedicated TPG staffer - would there be similar support for the public meetings as well?)
This also seems less inclusive - if you are a less experienced MediaWiki contributor who wants is interested in RfCs but are not sure whether you have anything to contribute, you can lurk on IRC and decide whether to pitch in or not. A hangout where you have to worry about displacing someone potentially more knowledgeable due to the participation limit, or taking air time away from such a person by talking, seems like a much less welcoming environment. (Also, this might just be a personality thing, but I find it much easier to express myself clearly and accurately in writing, as there is less time pressure - if you are not 100% sure in what you are about to say, you can spend a few seconds looking it up or thinking it over. In a video chat that seems more awkward. I imagine this would be extra problematic for someone who is not experienced or not well known and thus more worried about saying something stupid.) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l