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

[Chris Morrow <[e-mail]>]

Howdy,
for the folks that attended in person, and remotely I think we (chairs)
would like to get some feedback on how the meeting was done. I think we
know of a few stumbling blocks:
  1) late start/technology fail with the webex (probably webex
      operations failures more than anything - my fault)

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

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

  4) in-room audio failures with respect to typing noise

  5) lack of slideware (though really, most of the discussion was based
     on agenda notes, and slideware wasn't going to be particularly
     helpful, or so the thought went)

  6) microphone discipline for in-room vs external folks, often the
     in-room folk displayed (me too) an inability to wait their turn
    (jump into the conversation directly without queuing up, etc)

(there are likely others, I'd like to get those from the remote/local
folks as well)

We tried in this meeting to use:
  o webex for shared-notes/slides

  o webex 'voip' audio for those that could make that work

  o webex PSTN dialin (us-toll-free, us-toll only) for those which
    could not use webex 'voip'

  o webex PSTN for in-room audio/bridge-to-webex

  o jabber for in-meeting communication, disambiguation of speakers,
    questions and hand-raising/remote-questions.

I think the things that worked well were:
  o PSTN dial-in (especially the addition of local-to-callers numbers
    in non-US locations)

  o shared-application for note-taking

  o jabber for questions/hand-raising/etc


I think for this experience webex came out poorly (for me frustrating at
best). I'd like to see us either give the meetecho product a whirl
(which I think the secretariat supports for us) or go a bit more less
all encompassing:
  o etherpad/shared-doc/etc for notes
  o shared slides prior to the meeting (no slides, no slot. potentially)
  o jabber
  o pstn-bridge

and force some better mic/floor discipline.

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.

(for sizing I believe we ended up with ~21 folks in-room and 'some
number' maybe 10? remote)

-Chris
co-chair-2-of-3