 Cool so let's go ahead and get started. So this is a special thing of call pointed out that we should probably let the virtual people Show up and talk and say their piece. I wanted to let you guys say how the experience has been so far Clearly not ideal, but So put up your hand if you want to talk and then I will call you out and then you can unmute and say your piece Go back and forth Yeah, I'll say I mean, I think it was actually Pretty aside from the initial few minutes where we couldn't hear anybody. I think it actually ran really well and I think the video Was well supported having a mic in the audience is super important. I think it was a good Good virtual experience Kind of the same comments While comparable to actually being there it was infinitely superior to not be there to not be able to participate at all For any of the track stores and the call quality was good audio quality good mic display was good The only thing that was a bit in the downside was that raised hands are at request to unmute for not always seen so there was at least two sessions where The speaker was asking so is there any objections or anyone want to add anything and there's me screaming into the void Which can be followed up and again, so that wasn't great But I know it's also a fair test that someone keep an eye on the screen at all times But it was the only thing for me that went slightly negative if but it was overall a very positive experience Because there was a couple times that Jeff wanted to talk and I was standing up with the mic and didn't see him So if I could specifically ask why did we opt to go for the curated unmute because usually that wouldn't expect someone to zoom on me But we vaguely trust ourselves and if somebody oversteps we can force it to move Yeah, I don't know So like it was just a you know Track people were gonna be moderators and we were gonna kind of say So if we were giving feedback based on now's and the feedback was we should just allow them to unmute themselves whenever they want It's that something that the remote audience would agree with or did you think actually having curated mute was better So I we I think this is what ended up happening in like the file system thing and eventually in the process I think it was if you unmuted you were good to go But this clearly wasn't the case. I think the first day at all and so I think Going forward that's a better solution at least for us because we're all We all play well together Yeah, I like for the sessions where I could just unmute myself and start speaking I I think it was really good and the experience was much better. So so I really liked it and Actually overall, I think it was better than I I was expecting. It was really nice So, yeah, yeah, I wasn't actually sure whether there is something where you can see me or not but Okay, I will know for next time if it happens again Okay Yeah People who have dialed in particularly those for whom it's up to midnight. I mean, I really appreciate you putting in all the effort to Participate as well as you have because you you've made the such a better conference And it would it would be so much worse without you, you know, hoping to see you all in person next year, right? As a New person. I thought it went way better than I was expecting it to I I'm more comfortable interacting via text than via voice and I I felt that Having a zoom chat available that sometimes got read to the room was really great It would be nice if people Introduced themselves before they made Comments on the mic, but that's kind of a difficult to ask hard to remember and stuff But that's a new person. It might have been a little bit easier to know who was who that way that's all So if I can ask about the chat one of the problems we had on the room is that unless we're logged on to zoom Which most of us aren't we don't see the chat So it sort of has to be read to us before we can actually respond to the points Is was that the way this worked? Okay, so just having a moderator read the chat is better way Would you prefer that if we could interact individually which Stands the chance of basically becoming the whole way because everybody starts to chat over each other Yeah, I thought that Comments only getting read to the room if the moderator thought they were sufficiently important was a fine way and lowered my Fear of saying anything For those of us who were in person to see the chat Without having to log in to zoom I didn't want to log in to zoom because I was afraid that might disturb things and whatnot I think one of the benefits of the plumber's approach is the chat is not tied in to the Video conferencing system so it's possible for you know the in person Well, we have we haven't had in person attendees yet, but it might be nice if we could have like gotten on to the chat Even even though we're here in person so we could see what was going on In terms of comments from by the remote attendees and sometimes having a chat back channel is not the worst thing in the world Even if there's a foreground conversation happening, you know on the audio Yeah, so the kind of the original idea was that I was gonna have a separate IRC thing But I was worried that given how well all of you read your emails But that information was gonna get lost in translation So I opted for this because I cannot count how many of you asked me where the Calendar is when it was clearly on the It was four paragraphs down God forbid you read the entire email But the the preceding three paragraphs for all Linux Foundation policy. That's not surprising. We did stop after a couple of you Know, I'm just as guilty as the rest of you Hi, I wasn't mostly in the MM track and I've noticed that The session was like led by a remote person then Then this was in a mode where everybody could unmute without the without raising and then it was really much Simpler to contribute so I had So that offered a comparison some sessions were like this some not and I would prefer the Easier unmute Otherwise I can only repeat that what others said it It was much better than I would hope for so thank you for all the effort that went into supporting the remote participation and just one need For the video part the incoming resolution was sometimes insufficient for Screen sharing or some tiny fonts on slides because it was like 640 times 316 maybe that could be increased it would be a bit better if possible sorry for that This is my first time to attend and I got a precious chance to talk about my stuff and I really appreciate that and There are a lot of people give me really good advice and suggestions I Feel really glad about that. But as a virtual presenter I could not see who is talking in the conference room I Would really like to know who is talking and show my appreciation for those people So just wondering if like a I really want to be in person to Participate but if in the future or maybe is that possible like if a virtual presenter is Showing his stuff is that possible to put a little camera in front to show What's in the counter you can see one in you or zoom chat, but you see my laptop camera really does not show Everybody in the room is so far away. They all look like little dots wave your hands at the camera guys So Something like that. We actually need a camera man at the front to actually operate a camera and zoom in on the person Talking to you. So we were planning to do that for plumbers, but it cost a fairly fantastic amount of money Which is the treasure of the organization. I'm still not happy about it, but we will try but just to set expectations It's really expensive But if you think that little camera on the laptop does some good for you can do that facing into the room Yeah, and we should have done like I tried to in some cases type out who was talking But we could be better about that especially for virtual presenters There's no reason why we couldn't just have the people that want to talk come up to where the cameras pointed So we keep that in mind Thank you Hey So, yeah, it's also my my first time attending Everything was perfect. I think content wise it was perfect audio audio, there's a problem with Oscillating volume It just happened now When someone else was talking so I'm not sure if It's zoom related or the mic setup related but It happened like in every hour or so And of course the video as Vasti commented The code demos we couldn't see anything because of video quality But like I said other than that everything was perfect I really enjoyed and hope to attend next year as well Reiterating a lot of the comments that have already been made The volume control the volume seemed to bounce around in several the sessions Particularly the the table mikes versus the mikes in the front of the room a Reminder to some of the people who are speaking who at the front of the room who kind of wander around The stage they are wandering away from a microphone and That that hurts as well With regard to the video quality Zoom does have a high definition mode that needs to be turned on I Do appreciate that people kept their their home videos off in order to Minimize the the network traffic required to monitor the rooms that that's very very helpful From my experience in working with other conferences over the last several years remotely in particular HEPICS having a persistent Blog or wiki that is used for collecting comments during each of the sessions is Particularly helpful because the zoom chats are not persistent It is something you can brought you know put up on the screen in in the on-site as well and it allows people who Might be I don't know if these are being put up in on YouTube or something In semi-re in semi-real time to be able to go back and then add comments Later on when these sessions are replayed Having somebody in the room who is a kind of charge to be the the watcher of the tech space To be able to raise hands is particularly helpful and I'll say to James Even that small camera microphone Laptop camera that's facing into the room is Helpful from a feedback perspective because it gives those who are of us who are remote and in some indication of what's going on in the room and When somebody might it might be a good time for us to jump in to a conversation but Overall absolutely appreciate the opportunity to be able to take part in this You know I would not have been able to even if I had an invite I would not have been able to travel This year at the California For various reasons You're free to unmute and stuff and then well I can set up there with a camera for the remaining file systems So thank you for those of you who went to other conferences How does the video technology compare with the way other conferences have tried to do it? So I think OSSE OSSE was a bit of a disaster because it was chat only Which really didn't help for the interaction zoom really helps for me to see you because it's the interaction is two way But would you have any other recommendations for technologies things you liked things you didn't like you know Just if you don't if you don't say now, we're just gonna do what we think is best anyway, and you may or may not like it Generally the quality was was fairly good better than average and Flask to me mentioned this earlier the main time it got hung up is if the presenter was showing terminal text and You could make it out was by the time you'd have made it out whatever points the presenter was making would have moved on from it So either presenters would need to use a larger font or the Video needs to be higher resolution and hopefully whatever hotel that We're in at the time has sufficient bandwidth to make that work I For plumbers, I won't be able to make it I can tell you why I fly I know I'm living the country But I'm not going to have to make it Having a dedicated zoom screen So we're not trying to share this screen with your presentation and zoom zoom could just stay up all the time Okay, right and people can decide whether they turn the cameras on and off and it's not too cost prohibitive Okay, and then the other thing is to have what we call a zoom ambassador someone in whether they're here or in that zoom call to do All the pinning make sure that they Take ownership of that that'll make you know it flow. Okay. Thanks for letting me speak Yeah, no worries and like and I definitely want to make call you guys out. Maybe guys have been fucking fantastic Like they have done a superb job. It's been very easy Any of the problems that we might have had is mostly just been from, you know, me We really enjoyed it too. Thanks for having me. It's really helpful to have somebody reading the chats. You're welcome Cool. Well, we've got ten minutes to the next thing Does anybody have anything else that they want to say? Before that, what's up, man? Just would be good also from the in-person attendees to see some sort of global chat for for the events It'd be nice to be able to organize with people who are who are remote and people who are in the in the event You know when we're not in the sessions and we're not in the same place just to be able to say hello Slack IRC something like that. I got sort of a Facebook chat group. That's fine. Everybody uses that, right? I'm gonna say one more thing Do you think this worked pretty well just because of the ratios? Like it was it was like if it was 50-50 virtual versus not like here we had like maybe 10% virtual is that Part of why it worked so well. There's a small cadre of people that we trusted online. I think that's part You know, I think it is definitely part of it, right? I you know for the file system track like I miss Yon right and Yon has been able to talk more today And that's been good So we definitely have talkative people that are on that are virtual I know that Mel also has been able to participate a lot in MMS. I mean has I gone pretty well for you guys? Yeah, so but again like One or two or three guys Yeah, and I was just gonna to chime in a you know a word of appreciation for the fact that being virtual gives you Flexibility like I was at a face-to-face meeting for Facebook on in LA last week Came back COVID positive and feel fine, but about a quarter of the people were positive But it meant that you can come out of that without being too Undone also encourage people to put their mask back on the flights unlike me you know Did not like my double Vax status did not hold up Yeah, but it's nice to have I would agree having a few people virtual is means that we can take part without dominating it So the thing I really found about virtual problems is I just can't do time zones easily from home because For a remote conference, you're expected to get up to work the next day And it's going on to midnight. It's just I just find I can't do it So for virtually virtual events We tried to reduce the amount of time we spend in sessions each day to maximize the time zone overlap but obviously that still doesn't work for somebody right around the opposite side of the world And unfortunately for in-person events the expense of the hotel means that we couldn't afford to stay here for five days Three days, but how did you find the sort of nine-to-five nature of this because it is pretty extreme on most people I Don't think despite the fact of a virtual attendee I don't think we should try and compromise for To favor or accommodate virtual attendees yet a full-day work followed by a full-day conference after this crippling But I'm a virtual attendee and that's what I signed up for If we did the primary value of LSF for me in the past It's the in-person aspect because discussions that happen into the evening and that's not possible as a virtual attendee But suck it up. That's that that's the compromise that was made I don't Not too pushed about the camera But I have the advantage that I could almost almost always recognize the voice of who's speaking and I didn't need to see them It would be nice to be able to see them so good judge the reaction But unless they're right up against the camera, I'm not going to be able to judge your facial reaction anyway So it wouldn't it's not something that's very important to me But I think that the duration of the day should remain the same and favor those that are physically respite Okay, and that brings up one other point because you did mention the social events Which are an important way of getting face-to-face with people for detailed discussions? Hallway track is another you didn't really see what went on in the hallway track as we discussed things Would you have any? Recommendations for how we should try and integrate a hallway track into a conference like this So we're most attendees can participate. I think it's going to be really difficult But I think it's something we should think about because it's often been said that the hallway track is half the value of plumbers And indeed if you're Christoph Helbig, it's pretty much the whole of the value of plumbers I Don't think for me at least the camera wouldn't have helped because I can't actually interact with anyone there And I think it would have compounded the fact that I was a remotely present The old saying to be kind of creepy to be looking at people and in the hallway via camera. There's I Can't quite put my finger on I suppose I'd be uncomfortable doing it virtually and of course physically present I'd be slightly creeped out the idea doesn't have been watched big degree as You're in a more relaxed format then you're not you're not in the conference itself. You're not necessarily watching your mannerisms I Don't think it would be a good thing. It's a downside of if you're virtual your Experience is going to be degraded no matter where we look at us And if we make the virtual attending part to Accommodating it was a scourge more and more people being physically present and Ultimately then the conference was a virtual conference and a lose all value. So I Would be against but I've taken up cameras and all for the first always you're not there You don't get the hallway track. It's too bad. You are virtual But others might feel differently I've been around for a while. So I have like a fair amount of history and have something to compare it to Other people might feel very differently about this sessions like Like Mel says, I think that there's it's just going to be a less right and I think that's okay the virtual thing You know, I've wanted to do this for years and like have a way for people that aren't able to travel to come But with the knowledge that it was not going to be perfect being here is the perfect times getting This was really good and there's some things we can do to improve it I think kind of bending over backwards to Make it exactly the same Yeah, I just want to add with regard to James's question earlier about how this compared to other conferences One of the things about this conference is that the talks are very dynamic and they are very much on the fly so anything that that requires a pre-recorded or Pre-designed demo to be played In parallel really doesn't work here For the online HEPICS conferences the for with regard to the hours The way that those were handled for online is to split The hours so that there's a very early morning session for Europe Session for Asia and the session for for the US Stattered over 24 hours over four days That's exhausting and doesn't really fit well for an in-person I agree with Mel that the The in-person benefit is the place you want to be you don't want to degrade that What would be helpful from the the hallway from my perspective is that if you did have this kind of wickier blog if people either summarize their discussions to that to the mailing list or Provide some way of saying hey, we're talking about XYZ right now if you want to join in You know come come join this breakout room or something that somebody could set up on on their phone or their laptop Might be it might be an interesting idea, but possibly a lot of work