OPEN 2020 planning

Events meetings
21

I read through the thread and want to put my conference organizer hat on to comment on this. Some questions for @osb @mikemh:

  1. Do you now have a pretty accurate idea of how many people will participate in OPEN 2020 now?
  2. What is the reason you want to use breakout rooms?
  3. Do you have an agenda for the event?
  4. How many parallel tracks are you running?
  5. Have you written the communication to facilitators on digital tools, and if not when do you need to send it? Is there any pre-event gathering with facilitators?
  6. When do you have to make a call on all your digital tools?

Here are my suggestions:

  1. I would set a date with Meet.coop to evaluate the final platform, finalized configs on the production servers. Make a call based on that exact server and software, no changes are to be made after that date.
  2. Whether you use BBB, on Meet.coop or otherwise, or Zoom, plan for the platform to fail and have a backup strategy. (e.g. for Our Networks 2019 remote presentations, if Zoom failed we go to Hangout, and this was our communication to presenters).
  3. Don’t do the breakouts the way you envision it. It’s really hard to manage. Make rooms ahead of time, make sure those links are in the hands of participants before the event and they know where to go without day-of intervention.
  4. I think Open Publishing Festival has a really nice model where they seem to provide a BBB instance but many sessions are on other platforms. It makes the event not fail on a single point.
  5. Disable the notepad in the UI, it’s very easy to configure. Hypha’s instance has it disabled, because it’s shit confusing to have both chat and notepad.
  6. There are probably other things that can be worked around or have mitigation strategies.

Now with my Meet.coop hat, I think it’s strategically important that we have OPEN 2020 do a large session on here, so we hit a milestone, and can look at server behaviour and have one case study. It’s less critical that the entire event is on Meet.coop. So I feel making that possible is the best way to support the initiative, although with the right planning it’s totally possible that the entire event can be on Meet.coop.

If it helps, I am happy to have a call with you guys to discuss this from an event planning perspective.

2 Likes
22

I do fully recognise and resonate with what @chris wrtote:

This is an experiment to try to build something new, we are making it up as we go along, the best we can, with a belief that a better world is possible, there will be hiccups on the way but I’m quietly confident that we might pull this one off, but it is going to take a lot of work and we are still at the start of the journey.

And I recognise also the good faith and commitment of all involved in production team here.

At the same time, it’s a tough call for me as a session convener, to commit to going live in a few days, with participants newer to the tech than we (the Open2020 team) are, in an attempt to explore complex things with an unknown but possiibly large number of people . . with the tech as I experienced it today. Running a large conference session on complex issues is hard enough, before these kinds of difficulty and unfamiliarity are added.

I do understand that meet.coop doesn’t want to fail in this initial project and will pull out the stops: thank you. But Open2020 doesn’t want to fail either, at running a challenging conference. I’m by no means saying that as a session convener I wouldn’t go ahead if support seems solid (open2020 and meet.coop, both). But it is a tough call, and at this moment I’m unsure whether I myself have the stops to pull out, with what we were working with today (including our own inexperience) that will make a session work well enough for participants to feel it was a success.

I’m waiting on the sense of this that emerges among fellow conveners and facilitators, over the next day or (maybe) two.

Seems to me, this kind of advice is good, thanks . .

I think having a public page on which people have the whole agenda and links to all the session rooms, informal chat hang-out type rooms and plenary rooms, in advance, would really help, it should allow people to bookmark the agenda and then flit between rooms fairly easily without getting lost.

. . and we need to work hard on these kinds of design in the next couple of days. These are not so much fixes, more like kinds of facilitative skill that are new in the repertoire of a virtual gathering. I would be happy if participants feel able to ‘flit between rooms’ :slightly_smiling_face:

3 Likes
23

Good things here @benhylau thanks, including this:

Make rooms ahead of time, make sure those links are in the hands of participants before the event

2 Likes
24

Happy to disable the Etherpad for Open 2020 if required, we only just worked out how to enable it, but as a result we also know how to disable it!

1 Like
25

FWIW I think I personally would rather use an Etherpad in a separate browser window, independently created (and url posted in the BBB chat) than have one inside the already crowded space of the BBB window.

26

Thanks for all the feedback and suggestions:
We WILL start on BBB whatever happens
We DO have a backup plan - it’s called Zoom…
However, we want to make the BBB open source experience as good as possible for everyone!
These are the things which will make it impossible to convince people to stick with BBB:

The echo text / turn on your mic / camera issue every-time you join a new room.
I understand this is not a simple fix - but if there is any way we can hack / add something to avoid it it would be VERY much appreciated

I understand there is a limit on breakout rooms - but the suggestion to use other rooms isn’t really viable because:

  • Users will need to mute themselves in the original room or it buggers up the sound - plus even if they do it sucks up more bandwidth and the audio experience seems to degrade
  • They still have to go through the echo test etc

So we might just use another platform for breakouts - BBB just doesn’t seem to cut it for our needs atm :frowning:

One more significant issue - which could still stop us using the BBB platform altogether:
How do I download a video of a session???
And if we can work out how to do this - can we get the video of the panel AND the presentation/s in the same video without needing to edit it all together manually afterwards??? I see (when I play a “presentation” (video) in BBB) the videos of the people, and presentation, and the slide list all seem to be separate elements… Any ideas??

Cheers
Oli

27

Downloading a session video is still an outstanding feature request but we can wire up a post-script to make them available. The documentation says it covers this use case: “Compress media files and make them public available for download after it is published.”

28

FYI if is enabled, you can access it at the /pad/ URL of the server, so you do have https://demo.meet.coop/pad/, for a separate browser window. It’s possible to disable the toolbar button in the room via the module config so viewers don’t see the possibility of it. Furthermore, it is possible to have the notes available but disable them for viewers to edit (see this step-by-step).

29

cool - thanks
do u think we can wire up the post script soon so we can test how they come out?
We kinda need to see how they will come out (i.e. if they incorporate the presentations and videos of presenters) before we decide if we can use BBB…

30

Aiming for tomorrow latest, we’re guessing we can serve a directory listing at the /recordings/open2020 URL on the BBB domain instance which is protected by a password we can share with you all.

2 Likes
31

any joy on this - would be great to test the videos asap :wink:

32

I got my invite to the new CA meet.coop (in Spanish!)
But don’t think I am an Admin as I don’t have “Organisation” in my profile menu or the ability to invite anyone else - can someone upgrade me pls?

33

Tried my home room at CA.meet.coop. Working, thank you :smile:

Recorded 1min of audio & video. Playback was somewhat muddy, some noise - not the clarity of the live session. Can someone else check this out?

Joining with video seems slower than the old server. Transatlantic distance maybe? Joining with audio perhaps also (hard to tell, with all those infernal mouse-clicks on the sign-on process). A lag in getting into the room is a discouragement to an invitee? Do others notice slowness?

34

Hey, wondering if we can find a compromise on this one as we’re all full up with blockers and there seems to be a temporary work-around for this. So, as it stands, a user can view all recordings made by them by clicking on “All Recordings” on the top menu bar or going to the room where the recording was made and scrolling to the listing under “Room Recordings”. So really, you can already view the recordings after they have been made. Then after the event, we can arrange the files to be zipped up and sent over to you all.

35

ok - the view option wont work for us as we are not going to get everyone to register on green light - it’s just too clunky and has failed for us a few times in testing (users getting 404 when trying to sign up etc) … but if we can get a zip of all the files then sure, let’s not worry about this now… as long as we know that the server can handle storing a full 2 days of videos (without turning down the quality! we want them as high definition as possible really!) - I think there was some concern about this before?
Cheers
Oli

36

There is 847G of space in /var and we have just under 4TB of additional disk to allocate to the directories where the recordings are written and we will do that one night before the 11th June, it shouldn’t be an issue.

1 Like
37

on the new server, I don’t seem to be able to control all the settings for our rooms i.e. I don’t see “Organisation” in the menu when I click on my name - can you upgrade me to be an Admin?
We are planning to make it open access so people don’t need to sign up to Green Light to join… but then requiring a passcode for the event…

38

Please can you disable the “shared notes” on https://ca.meet.coop/b/oli-1vp-srh

39

Here’s the text for the welcome at the top of the chat:

Please can you replace

Welcome to OPEN 2020 - Main Room !
This service is provided by The Online Meeting Co-operative.

with:

Welcome to OPEN 2020!
See the event info and program here
The breakout and networking space is here

can you also disable / delete the text which comes up in the chat which reads:

To invite someone to the meeting, send them this link: The Open Co-op

40

YouTube video not streaming
I tested the streaming YouTube video presentation option, in my own room. It didn’t stream - or anyway, wasn’t visible to me.

This function is essential for a couple of sessions in the conference.

Here is the YouTube link used. It’s streaming OK in YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivjCr5_1xHc&feature=youtu.be

Here is the screenshot, which shows that BBB ‘thinks’ it is streaming. But nothing is displayed in the presentation.
BBB screen - video not streaming