CW20 - 2020-03-31 to 2020-04-02

“Conferencing 3.0: ensuring equality for in-person and online participants” - CI2-CW20

Participants

  • Emily Lewis
  • Esther Asef
  • Radovan Bast
  • Bezaye Tesfaye
  • Neil Chue Hong
  • Richard Darst

Context / Research Domain

When the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions lift, we will see a return to people wanting to restart in-person events whilst others will want to continue the online interactions. The challenge will be to create a combination of guidance and tools to help run events when we have mixed online and in-person interaction, to make sure we don’t introduce new issues? This will apply to most research domains.

Conferencing 1.0 - traditional in-person

Conferencing 1.5 - in-person unconferences

Conferencing 2.0 - online

Conferencing 3.0 - hybrid online, in-person, synchronous and asynchronous. Equality for online and in-person participants

Problem

How will we move offline again? When we have mixed online and in-person, how do we make sure we don’t get issues? Often in video conferences with combined physical and virtual presences, the online audiences are a secondary priority. It’s also much harder to get interactions going with people you don’t know online - this gets harder when in a hybrid mode as video chats are inherently a bit awkward.

Solution

A guide for people running events in the future, with pointers to existing materials and tools. The guide would be open for all to contribute to.

This would include:

  • Templates for different types/formats of meetings and events: help sessions, teaching sessions, closed / limited community workshops, open conferences
  • Repository of useful icebreakers that work
  • Methods to have “virtual” coffee breaks and informal networking.
  • Methods for chatting
  • “Twitch code review” and other sorts of peer-participation
  • Templates for asking/documenting questions and answers.
  • Personas of the different types of participant (everyone is not equal)
  • Lessons learned from other communities, e.g. online gaming broadcasts

It would also ensure that we took and combined the parts of each conferencing paradigm we most liked:

  • Conferencing 1.0 (traditional in-person):
  • Coffee breaks
  • Ice breakers
  • Conferencing 1.5 (in-person unconference)
  • Breakout sessions to mix up participants, introduce people to people they haven’t met
  • Lightning talks from all / most participants, rolling a random number generator to select participants to give introductory talks.
  • Conferencing 2.0 (online)
  • Accessibility, open to maximum number of audience, can join remotely. Takes into account travel and care limitations.
  • Virtual chat channels
  • Platforms that make asking questions less intimidating
  • Slack channel for sharing pictures of pets

We would also do a “literature review” to see if:

  • Work on this already exists?
    • E.g. Lessons learned from Mozilla
  • People already working on this?
  • We should be contributing this elsewhere?

Diagrams / Illustrations

The future of conferences?

Additional Notes

How is COVID-19 changing the way we’ll be running events and training after lockdown

  • Slack vs Twitter: Slack better for chatting, don’t have to think so much about publishing (as it is for Twitter), more like a coffee room chat
  • But you don’t want yet another channel
  • Online there are more distractions
  • Text chat doesn’t interrupt the speaker
  • Asking questions in a document allows better documentation and sharing with everyone
  • Events will become more shareable
  • Can be difficult to understand context, without good notes / good editing, introduce context
  • Easier to deal with “nasty” questions, as audience know that the speaker is seeing questions and comments in real-time
  • Making things public mean that people may be less willing to ask questions / try and fail - how do we prevent this
  • How to allow “outside” participants to participate (Observers vs participants?)

Description of the problem you are trying to solve

  • Esther: how to reach out to other researchers, especially when you can’t meet face to face. Thinking about an open consultation hour online.
    • What you wish to see, how to advertise and prepare
  • Richard: Trying to support researchers in computing fields. But there is a crisis of computing - tools are getting more complicated, but researcher preparation is getting less and less.
  • Bezaye: How do we impose on researchers to publish every software that is implemented as part of the process of publishing a paper?
  • Emily: Are there good tools and approaches for running a Software Carpentry workshop completely remotely
  • Radovan: Building a prototype (leaflet) map of RSEs and RSE groups where you can share twitter/github/homepage. Issues is that it is working, but e,g, several people at the same place will show up as one.
  • Neil: Been moving things online, what happens when we get out of the current lockdown and people are used to a different way of working? How will we develop events in the future, now that we have this new normal? What kinds of exercises and interaction modes work will online and in person. e.g. the reproducibility exercise, what other kinds of icebreakers

Resources from Carpentries Thread(2020-03-12 [discuss] Is COVID-19 virus demanding alternative software carpentry workshop delivery options?):

Carpentries collecting more info:

Code Refinery manuals

  • https://github.com/coderefinery/manuals/blob/master/online-training.md
  • Run both events and help sessions
  • Help sessions used to be people bringing laptops to get setup
  • Now have a Zoom meeting, where participants are put into breakout rooms one to one
  • Ensure that people know they are in a queue and they will be happy to wait
  • Advertise via local partners, subject librarians, friends & family, e-mail lists

Need to adjust speed of courses - we’ll need to see how this goes in practice.

  • Will people be able to follow along with live coding
  • Will exercises take longer
  • Will it be harder to see who’s falling behind?

Keep the Ice Breakers

Lessons learnt from Cw20 as a good reference