On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
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.
That's a great way to run certain kinds of planning or "present cool idea &
brainstorm about it to find cool things to start working on" sessions.
It seemed a lot of our sessions this time around were kind of halfway
between that style and either an open-room presentation or a small intense
workgroup; I think with a little better room/group separation for some of
the break-out groups we make more of them work like that and be more
inviting to remote participants.
Particularly if we can coordinate a little better with some of the
additional groups like the Language Committee & Wiki Loves Monuments people
-- as some folks said on-site the langcom folks seemed to be a bit more
aggressive about coming over and grabbing devs for questions & comments (hi
GerardM! ;) than the WLM folks, and we'd probably benefit from a little
explicit session time with both groups. Scheduling a brief breakout session
& letting the remote folks have the chance to show up for it too can help
here over just the ad-hoc connections we make person-to-person.
Etherpad's a particularly nice medium for the group note-taking since you
tend to end up with two or three people each sort of half-covering the
session in notes, and they can fill in for each other as attentions wander
to and from specific parts of the conversation. It also gives remote
participants a *direct* way to interact -- "what was THIS about? can you
clarify THAT?" -- before the on-site participants lose their context and end
up unable to clarify the documents.
Anyway long story short -- super great meetings, and I think we're well on
our way to figuring out how to do a fun & productive hackathon. Thanks to
everybody at WMDE, WMF, and the Beta Haus who helped make it a reality this
year!
-- brion