[ripe-list] participating remotely

I participated remotely this week from the east coast of North America.  That meant waking up in the teeny hours of the morning to watch the early sessions and getting to the office in the early afternoon after sessions ended.  Take that into account if the following seems grumpy.

First.  Boy, oh boy, I wish I could have been there in person.  Such exciting work, exciting times.

Here’s some observations of the experience of remote participation.  If there’s a more appropriate mailing list to use to comment, let me know.

I much appreciate the provision of video, chat, and transcription.  Very much.

I did experience technical difficulties.  Nothing the RIPE NCC needs to address.  Technical difficulties are as likely to be caused at the user end, I’m just reporting.  There’s a “contact us” web page, which I used.  I suggest a copy go to the sender.

-  The feeds do work, if not as well, over cellular, when one's regular connectivity fails.  Thanks for making sure the web pages are mobile-friendly. 

-  At breaks, when the sessions resumed, I would fairly frequently see errors: the transcript area sometimes displayed an error icon with a message "the event is not active, there is no need to refresh your browser.  We are attempting to reconnect”.  I tried reloading the page (against the instructions) and waiting for a reconnect, but neither worked.  Sometimes the video would not resume.  Reloading did not help that, either.  I got in the habit of closing the browser and reopening.

-  Once I tried to make a comment in the chat window, but I got an error that the IRC chat had failed and I needed to reopen the window. Which worked.  However, the chat window was showing the status of the wg in the other room and showed the chat for that wg.  But the transcript area was showing the correct wg.  Weird.  Unfortunately, I took no screen shot.

-  Once I made a comment during question time at the end of a session - that comment appeared in my chat window, but did not get captured in the chat log.


A different problem was timing comments.

The remote video and audio is about 30-60 seconds behind the transcript.  That made making comments at an appropriate time a bit tricky.  There wasn’t much time lapse between “any questions?” and “no? next speaker!”.  If comments come to mind during the presentation, one can post them early, but that isn’t always possible.  And if there were comments to make about comments at the mike, that’s even harder to time properly.

That’s life in remote participation, I suppose, and is remedied by email follow up, which I’ve done.

But the process could help somewhat if the delay for remote participation could be taken into account.  Like: wait at least 60 seconds after asking for questions to see if the remote participants say “yes”.  I do not know if that would be too frustrating for those present.  Particularly if remote questions are not the norm.

One final suggestion.

Those relaying questions from the chat room should be as faithful as possible to the question as written.

—Sandy

P.S.  RIPE chat windows are not nearly as chatty as IETF jabber windows.