Re: [sidr] Interim Meeting (Apr 30, 2012) fallout/lessons/room-foo

["Murphy, Sandra" <[e-mail]>]

I actually was pleased with the amount of useful participation we had from remote participants.  Of course, that does not mean that all participants were as pleased with their experience.

I'm glad that you found the note-taking useful.  I'm sorry that the typing of the note taking disturbed the audio.  At the time, the choice seemed to be (a) note taking noise and active telecon, (b) no note taking noise and no telecon.

Why?  The idea was that the remote participants would be participating via webex and so the webex should be used to broadcast the note taking to the remote participants.  To get the note-taking input into the webex broadcast meant that the note taking had to be on the webex host.  (See below for "in hindsight") Muting the host in webex wasn't possible because muting the host cut off the webex audio for the remote participants.

I am not at all sure why the typing noise was coming through.  There have been suggestions that webex finds a way around a platform's audio settings and can ignore the mute.  If true, then despite the fact that the host platform was configured to be mute, the webex was working against that.

In hindsight, note taking into etherpad on the web (as provided at recent ietf meetings), would have allowed the webex host platform to broadcast the notes without being the note taking platform.  etherpad -> web -> webex -> world.  Of course, the world can watch the etherpad directly.

(Powerpoint was chosen as the note taking tool on Monday with the thought that drawings done on the whiteboard could be rendered in powerpoint.  That was a futile thought (creating diagrams in ppt is just too slow) and meant the remote participants could not scroll back to see what had been typed before.)

The audio cutting out at various times was the result of various attempts to get the typing noise fixed.  Different people in the room had various suggestions, none of which worked.

The desktop sharing ceased a handful of times as webex reported problems.   I was told that each time sharing restarted, it took over people's screens.  From my experience in other webex sessions, that is a common feature of webex.  It may be a configurable option, who knows.

These interim sessions are intended to be intense discussions of thorny issues.  So we need:

real time audio in both directions with world wide access
real time view of presentations
real time note taking
real time chat
real time video?

One final note.  Whatever tools we use have to provide a way to archive the results.

Webex can provide all of those, but is proving to be a bit problematic, in some new way each time.

Webex has been used for our meetings before, but this time was the first time webex was being used to transmit the note taking and the first time integrated conference was used.

real time audio
    webex provides a teleconference number and an integrated conference audio (aka voip).  this was the first time 
    (I think) that the integrated conference audio was in use in a sidr meeting.  the webex telecon number (for ietf) 
    is US only, so we had some people connected by webex's integrated conference audio. On Monday, we eventually
    used an volunteered telecon number with local access worldwide and dialed that into the webex telecon.  If the
    integrated conference audio is not used, the meeting room needs a way to dial into the telecon (whichever).
real time view of presentations
    on Monday, we were using webex to broadcast the presentations
    we could also just upload the presentations to the ietf and be rigorous about letting remote people know what
    slide we are on
    (uploading slides means people can scroll back at will, and they need an app to view the slides)
real time note taking
    on Monday, this was done on the webex host platform.  see discussion about typing noise.
    we could also use jabber for note taking, as was done in San Diego.  but, as has been said, using one jabber room
    for both chatting and note taking is not ideal.  support for multiple jabber rooms in the ietf could be explored.
    we could also use etherpad for note taking.  etherpad also allows for remote participation.
    either jabber or etherpad allows for scrolling back.
    as a matter of fact, webex is generally limiting the participant to whatever is being seen on the shared space
real time chat
    jabber room support is provided and expected
    webex has a chat feature
real time video
    if it can be displayed on a desktop, it can be shared in webex
    various other apps can share video

Any combination of these are possible.  Do we want webex to do everything or do we want to use a collection of different tools?


--Sandy, speaking as wg co-chair

________________________________________
From: [e-mail] [[e-mail]] on behalf of Samuel Weiler [[e-mail]]
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2012 3:43 PM
To: Chris Morrow
Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [sidr] Interim Meeting (Apr 30, 2012) fallout/lessons/room-foo

On Thu, 3 May 2012, Chris Morrow wrote:

> I'd also (and sandy as well) would like some feedback on this
> message, the meeting, and suggestions for what a direction forward
> might be.

I will observe that my support for having interims was conditioned on
improving the remote participation experience[1].  I think we did not
hit the bar on Monday.  In the absence of a concrete plan to make
further progress, I feel I must withdraw my support for having
interims.

Knowing one voice in opposition may not change the consensus call for
having interims, I'm still going to try to make some constructive
suggestions.

>  1) late start/technology fail with the webex (probably webex
>      operations failures more than anything - my fault)

I heard grumbling in the room in Reston re: having taken the trouble
to travel there only to be faced with a seriously delayed WG meeting.
There was talk of wandering off to another location to "get work
done".  We may need to deeply consider the plan for what happens if we
fail at making the tech work in the future.

>  2) audio issues (occasionally the webex audio would cut out)

I believe some people were using the WebEx "integrated" audio, and the
source for that in Reston was not the speakerphone but was instead a
single laptop's built-in microphone.  That audio was bad and, as you
report, would frequently just stop entirely.  As best as I could tell,
the integrated audio and PSTN call were not connected, and I'm not
sure that anyone on the integrated channel could talk back to the
room.

The PSTN audio outbound from Reston was decent, though not as good as
I was hoping for.

>  3) local dial-in for webex-call for non-US participants

I don't recall seeing a toll-free number for the US.  Such would be
helpful in the future.

I found Sandy's live notes to be very helpful.  They would have been
better if I could have paged back through them on my own schedule and
if they hadn't kept trying to take control of my screen.  Jabber
worked fine.  For those in the room, I think having tables/desks would
be more comfortable -- I don't like having my "laptop" on my lap for
the duration of a normal WG meeting, and doing that for eight hours is
too much.

As for future suggestions re: remote participation, I refer back to my
note of 27 March:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/sidr/current/msg04288.html

I continue to believe that advance testing, delegation of the tech
issues, and providing one microphone per person will help improve the
experience.  There was a suggestion on Monday to use multiple jabber
rooms: one with the (live) notes, and one for
discussion/questions/etc.  Assuming we don't find a better shared
note-taking tool, I'm fine with trying that.

Video seems like it might help with integrating the remote folks,
though I have little experience doing video with large numbers of
remote participants.

-- Sam


[1] http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/sidr/current/msg04268.html

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