Subject: Re: [vmeet] Fwd: WebEx and Remote Presentations

From: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:59:36 +0200

Le 24/06/2010 22:26, Peter Saint-Andre a écrit :
> 1. large rooms with boomy audio
>
> 2. lack of A/V knowledge among the chairs and participants
>
> 3. a weak room-to-telephony transition (including issues with audio
> mixers in the room and literally masking tape holding things together)
>
> 4. lack of clear instructions for those who are running the meetings
>
> 5. unprepared working group chairs
>
> As far as I can see, those problems are not limited to Webex and would
> be faced by any other conferencing system we might use.
>   

Completely agree - and I would indeed also like to see a "lessons
learnt" document of some sort, even a short one, explaining what the
main challenges were.
ISOC has recently completely a members & chapters meeting in Brussels
(during ICANN). I followed the meeting remotely using Webex and I
managed to interact remotely with few problems. Sound was a challenge,
but the Technicians did a fantastic job, constantly monitoring things.
It really showed me that if set-up correctly, and if run by competent
people, remote participation *can* work.
Warm regards,

-- 
Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond, PhD
http://www.gih.com/ocl.html

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From: Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:58:33 -0600

> people, remote participation *can* work.

I think that part of the challenge for the IETF is that we have many
different rooms and a different cast of characters running the meetings
in each venue (various hotels and conference centers) and the specific
sessions at each meeting (untrained WG chairs). Did ISOC have just one
room to deal with? What can you tell us about the setup and how the
meeting was run?

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:54:28 -0700

On Jul 16, 2010, at 11:58 AM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:

> I think that part of the challenge for the IETF is that we have many different rooms and a different cast of characters running the meetings in each venue (various hotels and conference centers) and the specific sessions at each meeting (untrained WG chairs). Did ISOC have just one room to deal with? What can you tell us about the setup and how the meeting was run?

There are a couple of parts of this. One is that ISOC has quite a bit of experience doing the same thing with Marratech, which has faults but has served them very well. Part is that they decided up front that they wanted to make this work. You would know better than I, but I don't believe that they asked for a donation - they bought the service - and they dedicated budget and staff to making the right thing happen. At IETF meetings, A/V is a seriously second consideration.

I have used Webex (from Stockhom) in a working group meeting, and in my experience the expected thing happened. It required me (as chair) to host webex from my laptop, and it required an A/V tech in the back of the room, with the right equipment and cables. That included a remote presenter as well as distribution of a feed. My experience says that with the right tools and skills it can work. It also says that doing that in N separate rooms in parallel means have N parallel instances of the right tools and skills. Making that happen has a budget impact, and between the IETF tradition of doing things on a shoestring and the IAOC's desire to not increase meeting fees, budget impacts get looked at pretty hard...