On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 2:59 PM, Sumana Harihareswara <[email protected] > 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 _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
