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

Remote Conferences and Collaboration: The Turing Way - CI5-CW20

Participants

Sarah Gibson, Stephan Druskat, Louise Brown, Jurriaan H.Spaaks, Sam Mangham

Context / Research Domain

Issues on The Turing Way repository

Due to the current COVID-19 crisis, remote work has become the default mode of working for most people in research, but it has also been common practice for different people and projects before that. How can we, working remotely, maintain the communities in this mode, and make sure that the community and the people involved in it remain healthy, and productive, and have all the information and technical support they need? In open source, this sort of remote work has been common. How can we disseminate the lessons learned in these communities to research groups and teams who are experiencing remote work, collaboration, teaching for the first time?

Problem

People may never have worked with any of the available collaboration tools, and may not have seen the necessity of using them. Those that are new to these workflows and tools may find it hard to find and access the available resources. Nevertheless they will need to find answers to questions such as “Are the tools we choose to run our events accessible across all platforms?”, “Do we exclude, e.g., Windows users by picking a particular video conferencing tool?”, “We miss the sociability of the coffee breaks, how can we simulate them?”, ”Are there different opportunities we gain from being remote?”, “How can we counter the dangers of being in a remote event, e.g., doing multiple things at once instead of just ‘being at the conference’?”

Solution

We describe considerations, workflows and tools for running remote activities for people that need to facilitate such an event but don’t have any previous experience. We would also like to capture things about CW20 that worked well for running future online conferences. In the course, we will describe which tools and features work well for which purpose, and other features (e.g., pricing, necessity to download, open/closed source). We also suggest solutions for more general issues, such as scheduling, and work modes suitable for online conferences (e.g., set your away message to be able to concentrate on the online event).

Outcome

A subsection of a Turing Way chapter on running collaborative online events which describes the use case of running an online event with different requirements.

Structure:

  1. Activity types / Use cases (Mix and match these to build your online event!) \
  • workshop \
  • hack event \
  • poster session \
  • prototyping/ideas session \
  • presentations (including lightning talks) \
  • pre-recorded presentations \
  • panel sessions \
  • async collaboration on a text \
  • Tools for pair-programming
    1. Requirements \
  • breakout rooms \
  • chat \
  • video/audio (where can these be tested?) \
  • VCS integration \
  • live streaming \
  • whiteboard \
  • Recording tools for pre-recorded talks 1. Available tools \
  • feature matrix \
    • account needed? How can people join? \
    • installation needed? \
  • paid-for/free \
  • open source 2. How to replicate/simulate the social aspects \
  • Zoom backgrounds ;) \
  • Virtual water cooler/coffee break \
  • Virtual pub quizzes 3. Things you wouldn’t do in person but can do virtually \
  • collaborative notetaking \
  • pre-recording talks 4. Scheduling (may be an issue particular to online events because people will be in their own timezones, not all in one)

Diagrams / Illustrations

Incomplete list of tools to discuss in the chapter

  • Zoom
  • Slack
  • Git
  • GitHub/GitLab
  • MS Teams
  • HackMD
  • CryptPad
  • Discord?
  • Trello - can be linked to BitBucket
  • ZenHub - GitHub integration (permissions issues)
  • Easy to record?
  • Presentation tools - Powerpoint? Binder?!
  • Sli.do
  • Mentimeter
  • Live-share VSCode extension
  • Eclipse plugin for pair programming
  • Overleaf
  • Jupyter Notebooks for interactive slideshows
  • Tool for indicating remaining time to speakers
  • VR (+ discord) for social sessions (the virtual pub!)