Open Stack

On Fri 01 Nov 2013 12:40:44 PM PDT, Jaromir Coufal wrote:
> Since I have quite good experience with using these hangouts on air, I
> wanted to propose it as a general way how to get our sessions more
> accessible. Lot of people are asking how they can get more involved
> and I received very positive feedback for streaming; so I believe that
> the audience is definitely there.

Yeah, we had those requests in the past too and we've tried to 
accommodate them in different ways. The feedback at the end was always 
poor and we isolated the root causes not in technology but in social 
behaviour and expectations. The remote audience expected smooth 
almost-real-life presence to the event and that's just not going to 
happen because: things during the design summit get frantic, schedules 
are hard to keep, discipline (always talk in a microphone, always 
identify yourself, don't talk over somebody, keep background noise low, 
etc) is almost impossible, technical glitches and small network 
disruptions are to be expected, timezones are a fact of life. And on 
the other side of the event, I have never heard of anybody taking a 
break from work/life to follow the remote event: people barely pay 
attention while 'multitasking', except the one or two that really need 
to be involved.

This lead us to give up trying for Hong Kong. We searched for 
alternatives (see the infra meeting logs a few months back and my 
personal experiments [1] based on UDS experience) and the only solid 
one was to use a land line to call in the crucial people that *have to* 
be in a session. In the end I and Thierry made a judgement call to drop 
that too because we didn't hear anyone demanding it and setting them up 
in a reliable way for all sessions required a lot of efforts (that in 
the past we felt went wasted anyway).

We decided to let moderators find their preferred way to pull in those 
1-3 people ad-hoc with their preferred methods.


> I think what we can do (and it won't take a lot of extra effort) is:
[...]

I'm happy to help you do that. If it works, good for you and for all 
the people that won't be in HK. The room should have enough bandwidth 
to handle that and there should be a way to connect a laptop to the 
mixer so at least people online will be able to get the audio straight 
from a good source. If you have audio cables, take them with you.

> I would like to try this at least in sessions which I am leading (and
> use my youtube's channel), but I believe that this is very beneficial
> for all projects and sessions. It might be on moderators
> responsibility to take care about that, or it can be globally setup
> for each hall.

Indeed, each moderator can let us know for the summit after HK what 
they would like to have.

/stef


[1] 
http://maffulli.net/2013/03/17/simple-live-audio-streaming-from-openstack-summit-using-raspberrypi/

--
Ask and answer questions on https://ask.openstack.org