Hey all,

Last week, Red Hat hosted a 'Running Virtual Meetups' virtual session, with presenters from both Red Hat and others in the industry. I attended, hoping to gleam potentially interesting insights into how we can run our virtual PTG. Here are my notes:

In real PTG, the physical and geographical aspects of it make it much easier to separate from our usual work. The usual calls, tickets, emails, whatever, take a back seat due to the constraints of a PTG setting. In a virtual PTG, with us sitting at our usual desks, this will become much harder.

This leads into the next point - participant engagement. Having technical conversations for 8 hours a day is already hard enough when you're in the same room as the people you're conversing with. When those people are pixels on your screen, it becomes even harder. The session I attended was geared more towards presentations than PTG-style roundtable discussion, so I'm not sure that the proposed mitigations would apply to us. For instance, live polls make no sense in a PTG context.

One interesting suggestion was to do physical movement between topics/sessions. The online attention span of a human is estimated to be around 10-15 minutes, so having participants stand up and walk around their desk/kitchen/hallway 4 times an hour could be something worth trying.

Another way to keep folks engaged is to actually do things besides talking. In our context, this could mean hacking on some POC code together, or collaboratively writing a spec. Again, the session I attended was geared more towards presentations, so the suggestion was to do live debugging. It's actually more engaging when things break and you fix them as a group, than when a presentation goes off without a hitch.

That was about it. There was also a list of potentially useful tools, that I'll present here as a link dump because I've never used any of them:

https://www.mentimeter.com/ https://pollev.com/ http://roll20.net/ https://obsproject.com/ https://www.sli.do/

The danger is that too much tech brings complexity that's difficult to manage, so sticking to simple well-known tools can also be an advantage.

Hope this is useful, cheers!