Daniel,
You are very welcome, and thanks to the WMDE team for making it all
possible.
At Nikerabbit's suggestion, an excerpt from a LWN article about Ubuntu
Developer Summit describing how to thoroughly encourage participation
from remote & local audiences:
All of the UDS meetings are set up the same, with a
"fishbowl" of
half-a-dozen chairs in the center where the microphone is placed so
that audio from the meeting can be streamed live. There are two
projector screens in each room, one showing the IRC channel so that
external participants can comment and ask questions; the other is
generally "tuned" to the Etherpad notes for the session, though it can
be showing the Launchpad blueprint or some other document of interest.
The team that is running the meeting sits in the fishbowl, while the
other attendees are seated just outside of it; sometimes all over the
floor and spilling out into the hallway. "Audience" participation is
clearly an important part of UDS sessions.
-Sumana
On 05/19/2011 11:07 AM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Hi Sumana!
Thank you for this very useful summary of the feedback. That goes streight to
our Lessons Learned page :)
And of course a special thanks to you and Guillome for tirelessly hacking the
sessions into etherpad. And of course to Jesse Scott, who took care of the
streaming. We would have been lost without you, guys!
-- daniel
On 19.05.2011 12:59, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> Thanks for clarifying, Andrew and Happy-melon. I've thought of a few
> things we could have done, but were often too busy directly taking
> notes to do:
>
> * Ensured that the speakers actively asked for questions _from IRC and
> remote participants_
> * More consistently& explicitly asked for questions via IRC and Etherpad
>
> Happy-melon, I do believe that posting to wikitech-l is a way to tell
> people who are actively seeking MediaWiki-related information -- after
> all, they chose to subscribe to the list! But I take your point. For
> next time:
>
> * Include "we want your remote participation, here's how" summary at
> the *top* of the hackathon's canonical page -- in this case, at
>
mediawiki.org
>
> With folks in the #mediawiki IRC channel, I've also developed some
> additional lessons learned/TODOs for next time:
>
> * Need multiple dedicated notetakers (1 is not enough during
> quickly-moving discussions) PLUS a person to actively monitor
> IRC/Etherpad/Twitter and explicitly ask for questions and comments,
> plus probably another for backup/relief. (Wikimedia's Germany chapter
> had attempted to recruit more local hackers as notetakers and couldn't
> get them -- perhaps next time!)
> * Etherpad makes it unclear how to ask questions -- chat? main body
> of the text? Consider a dedicated Etherpad for Q&A, or templated
> areas within the notes set aside for questions
> * Encourage other people at the conference to get on IRC& Etherpad
> and respond to the questions and comments from remote participants
> * Consider dedicating discussion time, possibly after each batch of
> speakers, for questions and comments from remote and in-person
> participants
>
> I'm glad it was easy to follow what was going on from afar! So it
> sounds like this was definitely an improvement over past hackathons in
> this respect. Next time: better interactivity. Thank you for the bug
> reports.
>
> Best,
> Sumana Harihareswara