Re: DISPATCH Virtual Meeting

[Patrick McManus <[e-mail]>]

Thanks Ben! It was an experience :)

I took a few notes on how it went so I thought I would share them as well -
Maybe these notes will help you with your virtual sessions.

There was good turnout - around 150 on the webex. The overall experience
reminded me more of my brief days as a high school radio DJ than as a
traditional meeting moderator. (Pete Resnick, you're on the air!) The lack
of video made this feeling even stronger. It was really hard to understand
the feeling in the room without any body language to look at so you might
want to ask more prompting questions to see if they get a response.

Muting is absolutely vital. Periods in which we didn't have cooperation on
that were very painful and this cyclically popped up during the 2 hours.
The secretariat took some proactive muting action (thank you!) and you can
reach them at [e-mail] to get help. DMs to offending microphones
were only semi effective and beware that if the secretariat selects mute
all you might lose your mic or the presenters (this appears to have
happened to us once, it was no big deal - but beware) too without warning.

We chose to have the chairs show the slides to keep the chaos of screen
changing down to a minimum. We designated one chair to show/advance the
slides and the other to track the queue and let folks know it was there
turn. I recommend this. We kept the queue to be only after the presentation
to simplify the process - and I think that was the right call. Back and
forth worked fine.

We failed to make sure everyone was introduced by their full names when
speaking. We have this issue in person too, of course, but it seemed easier
to forget in the faceless forum but is probably even more important to
remember.

The etherpad bluesheets worked OK - nearly the same number of entries as
webex participants. I put the etherpad link in the webex chat and made sure
to verbally bring it up several times. I noted on the top of the etherpad
that the bluesheets were at the bottom, after the minutes so folks loading
the page for that purpose found them easily.

Other than our presenters, we didn't really hear from many new folks.
Sometimes that's just the way it is, but I do like to help with that
process when I'm chairing a meeting and I fear that the audio-queue was
more intimidating than the regular in person one. Something to think about.
Some kind of hum replacement might at least provide a clue as to whether
everyone is on the same page or not.

In general folks were good about the webex chat vs the jabber chat and
there was no jabber relaying that had to be done. Ben did get us note and
jabber volunteers beforehand which I think was vitally important.

HTH. good luck everyone!

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 10:28 PM Ben Campbell <[e-mail]> wrote:

> HI,
>
> I was very skeptical that DISPATCH could have a useful virtual meeting. I
> was afraid that we would not get a cross-section of interests, and that
> only people with a vested interest in agenda items would attend.
>
> I was mistaken. This was one of the best DISPATCH meetings we’ve had since
> I’ve been a chair.
>
> We had very good attendance. Possibly more than we would have had
> in-person. Discussions overall went very well.
>
> Some observations:
>
> Patrick and I planned in advance how we would share the chair load.
> Patrick acted as emcee, and I handled queue management and only jumped in
> occasionally. We badgered people into volunteering to take notes and scribe
> jabbers in advance of the meeting. If we fell down at any of that, the
> crowd would quickly jump in to support us (especially when I got the queue
> out of order—lots of experienced IETFers paid close attention. They pay
> especially close attention when one screws up the times of other sessions
> that one mentions in one's chair slides. Not that I would know.)
>
> People handled queuing very well. No one spoke out of turn. We had
> multiple presenters who were new at IETF participation, but they mostly
> handled it well.
>
> As far as I could tell, people did not have a problem joining. Maybe that
> was because we started after close-of-business for most of the US. Or
> because we were 10m past the hour. Or maybe we were luckly.
>
> There was a lot of interesting side-discussion in the jabber chat—to the
> point that I wonder if we can encourage more of it to make it into the
> webex. I know that gets logged, and people can review it, but I doubt it
> will be captured in institutional memory as well as the minuted stuff.
>
> ( BTW, we might should remind participants that it does get logged and
> presenters may review that log. People can get a bit more harsh in the chat
> than they might be at the mike.)
>
> We did get the occasional problem when a person forgot to mute. Overall it
> wasn’t bad. We got an occasional side coversation, but the worst was when
> someone has the session running on multiple devices with live mikes. (The
> feedback from that is very…distinctive).
>
> Part way through we were asked to introduce speakers by full name. I
> assume that was meant to include people in the discussion queue. When
> people get introduced by the queue manager, they don’t tend to state their
> names. It’s probably easier to just let the introducer do that.
>
> In my opinion, this approach could work on a regular basis. I don’t mean
> to say we can dispense with in-person meetings altogether-- the fact many
> people knew each other may have been an important success factor.
>
> I’m sure Patrick will have additional thoughts, and we welcome feedback
> from anyone else who attended.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Ben.
>
>