Re: my reflections on next symposia

Hi all,

I'll throw my own 2 cents into the ring. Technical glitches aside (and 
lets face it these things happen) I found the format of the symposium a 
little restrictive, and I agree with Giorgio that the lack of 
interaction was a big let down. This is something we can tweak, and 
adding social networking to the mix would certainly be a good idea. I 
think IRC was underutilized also. I know there are concerns about a low 
SNR on IRC if there are a lot a people but the same could be said of 
Twitter, or indeed any 'chatter' channel. Having said that not using 
these tools is to miss the potential for some interesting threads to 
develop, as well as the group 'gelling' with others who share our 
interests. This will help to grow a sense of community, or at least I 
find this so.

Something else I found difficult was to keep track of the points that I 
wanted to make in response to the presentations, and then having to wait 
until all the presentations ended then gave a lack of immediacy. As a 
result you may not even bother making your point, as the meeting has 
moved on. Even if people could post questions on IRC, or via Twitter to 
the chairs would be have been really helpful. It would also give us a 
sense of where people are at, and their concerns - as well as sparking 
interesting discussion.

I don't think also that we can expect people to only use land lines. 
Personally, it is expensive for me to ring the US W3C bridge from 
Ireland for two hours, so I've got to use a VOIP system like Skype. If 
anything, our experience shows how difficult it is to manage and 
administrate a symposium using these tools when a lot of people attend, 
but we can work out ways to tweak it and make interactions 'flow' more 
easily.

It would be good if any textual transcribing could be muxed with slides, 
so there is a greater sense of context. It can be messy when you have a 
browser window open with the transcription, another with the Slides in 
Powerpoint/Browser, an IRC client and Skype.

Despite the limitations of the format, it was interesting to hear 
peoples ideas and there is certainly enthusiasm for this topic - which 
is great. Many thanks to all the presenters and attendees, and with some 
fine tuning the format will improve.

Cheers

Josh

Received on Wednesday, 7 December 2011 09:16:46 UTC