Re: Disappointing take-up of Gather.Town

[Christian Hopps <[e-mail]>]

I've tried staying in there (but muted using the "busy" indicator), and looking around occasionally for folks to have a side-conversation with. Same experience as you though, not a lot of participation.

It might be useful to have the ability to be notified when someone becomes active.

I think having to mark oneself "busy" in order for it to mute the camera and mic when I'm not looking at that web page is a problem too. I'm not really busy, I just don't want my camera and mic recording me when I'm not looking at the gather.town page. In person I know if someone is standing in front of me when I'm working on my laptop, not so with gather.town.

Thanks,
Chris.

> On Jul 30, 2020, at 7:34 AM, Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 12:30:56PM +0100, Adrian Farrel wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Am I the only one to miss random corridor conversations that happen at
>> face-to-face IETF meetings?
> 
> Surely not!
> 
>> Of course, planned coffee-time meet-ups can still be scheduled using a
>> variety of meeting tools, but the casual bumping in to people and talking
>> about things, and (better still) hooking into other people's conversations
>> to learn and share, is a real loss.
>> 
>> So I have been hanging around in Gather.Town
>> (https://ietf.gather.town/z6N2SDxHebMdDAfo/IETF-108) and found this has
>> worked quite nicely for exactly that reason. Quick hellos, short chats, or
>> longer rambling debates have all been working nicely.
> 
> Indeed, we had a nice group conversation yesterday.
> 
>> But where is everybody? The number of people in the application seems to
>> range between 20 and 50.
>> 
>> Is the problem that Gather.Town makes you run all sorts of scripts that
>> might be a bit icky? Or are we all really just antisocial?
> 
> My personal guess is that more outreach would (have) help(ed).
> 
> I've been trying to mention it in the closing remarks for my WGs now that
> I've had some good experiences with it.
> 
> -Ben
>