Last night we carried out an experiment. With a threat of inclement weather hanging over our collective heads, I took it upon myself to schedule a last-minute online meeting using Citrix’s GoToMeeting service to allow BOSPDAUG members to participate remotely. Two members were able to take advantage of this, and others attempted to login. So far the feedback is mostly positive and, all-in-all, I think the experiment was success, particularly for a first attempt. George and I intend to continue facilitating virtual meetings for the immediate future. However, there are some lessons that I want to carry forward and some thoughts and concerns I want to share. It should go without saying that this is all fodder for discussion.

Most important , we must never treat the BOSPDAUG meeting as a radio show. If George and I want to do a podcast, we should do that on our own time. This is a user group meeting and, whenever necessary, decisions should be made in favor of those in physical attendance. If technical issues are going delay the start of the meeting we should fight our “inner geek”, abandon the webcast/GTM and have our meeting. That’s not to say that we don’t want to work towards increasing and improving the participation from the GTM audience (we do!) but the people who “show up” are going to be favored.

I feel that our lack of a formal agenda for last night pushed us slightly over the line towards “podcast”, though the response wasn’t negative and I think we got away with it. In future meetings during presentations the presenter(s) will have the floor and control of the “screen.” Someone else will ride the board and the machine controlling the GoToMeeting. (See further tech discussion below.) Now that we’ve proved the concept, we plan to increase the number of microphones to better allow attendee participation to be shared with the remote audience. One change (which may improve the physical meeting too) is that the audience microphone can serve as a “talking stick” assuring that everyone gets a turn at asking their question or making their point. Bottom line, each member of the group must continue to have a “voice”, and that voice should be shared with the offsite participants. There are some limitations on the GoToMeeting account. My account (disclosure: provided free by Citrix) allows no more than 15 participants in a meeting. We need to reserve one slot for the “presenter” computer (again, see below). My practice, until it’s decided otherwise, will be to send out invitations to any BOSPDAUG member who requests one—but it will be “first login-first served” in terms of participating AND I’ll need to reserve the right to toss one off if we need it for production purposes. I would like to limit GTM participants to people who are part of the group—that is that they are, or at least were, regular participants who are unable to attend a meeting (or meetings) for various reasons. (With a little assurance as to exactly “who” is on the mailing list, we might be able to use that to send out a single “group” invite to the GTM.)
My complimentary GTM account was issued for one year and I don’t know if it will be renewed. In addition, I don’t feel comfortable giving anyone else access to the account, so it will only be available when I can “participate”—at least to the degree of starting the meeting and setting a presenter. If anyone else has a GoToMeeting account, please consider offering yourself as an auxiliary. George and I had a brief discussion about obtaining a GoToWebinar account for the group (we will investigate the possibility of a “deal” for a group like ours that only wants to do two webinars a month.) There was also mention of various free methods of doing this which we could investigate. I have to say though that, from a technical standpoint, the GoToMeeting software was painless and seemed to work very well.

To grow our audience, George is thinking of setting up a streamcast that would allow unlimited listeners to tune in. This URL could be publicly available. We need to recognize that there may be times when we need to cut the feed to the streamcast or GoToMeeting, or both. We may have a presenter sharing information that needs to be somewhat protected. We may be operating under NDA or just have a presenter who isn’t comfortable with being broadcast. See rule one: the physical meeting will take precedence.

Those “tuning in” must respect the fact that we (or at least “I”) won’t be censoring ourselves. What happens at the meeting will (unless filtered for other reasons) be transmitted over the air. Last night one of our participants noted (non-critically) that he had to hide the screen because his children had come into the room. We were discussing the Apple “porn purge” and the screen was from Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5477864/why-apple-banned-sex-apps-we-were-getting-complaints-from-women?skyline=true&s=i When this was brought to my attention last night I changed the screen because it was no longer necessary for the conversation. However that might not always be the case. The same goes for things that might be said—we’re an adult group and we occasionally speak in adult language. (Or, maybe I speak like an eighth grader in the locker room). This wasn’t an issue because the participant who commented (and I want to emphasize that he didn’t complain) about the risque screen content was wearing headphones while his kids sat on his lap. Again, we need to be true to rule one and it will be up to the offsite participants to react to the “broadcast” as they deem necessary.

A bit about the tech: Moving forward, George will bring a field mixer (a little Mackie) and analog microphones which will reduce one of the technical issues we had—apparently the driver for my Samson USB mic is less-that-perfect and any time you switched “presenters” in the GTM software, the input gain on the mic was reduced in the Sound Preferences Pane. I also have a handful of good quality analog microphones. (I might even still have a small mixer, though it’s no Mackie.) We would like to provide two mics up front for use by presenter(s) and/or host(s) and at least one microphone for use for comments from the floor. We also definitely want to allow comments from remote participants—but this will place a burden on those participants to get their own audio houses in order. You don’t need perfect audio, but if we can’t understand what you’re saying, you’re going to have to revert to text chat. This will work best if we have one person to conduct the physical meeting and another to run the tech, follow the iChat, etc. We will use two computers. One serves as the “board” running the GoToMeeting software and providing the room audio feed. The “producer”, who runs the board, can also be searching for and collecting relevant web links to feed to the presenter. The other computer is logged into the meeting and designated as the presenter, with audio fed into the mixing board. The presentation screen can be kept free of the GTM cruft. I would suggest that the GTM chat NOT be present on this screen. Instead we can run a local iChat session and relevant comments from remote participants and links can be pasted into that by the producer. In a pinch, the whole thing CAN be run from a single machine. If necessary, the board machine can go live should the presenter’s computer crash or in the event that we need to fill time as we switch machines between presenters.
Using the built-in camera to show a live iPhone screen worked reasonably well. This experience can be improved by using a Gorillapod (or similar) mount to hold the phone steady, which has the added benefit of freeing up the presenter’s hands to use for the demo. Better yet, we can use an external camera pointed down at the phone.
Finally, though it isn’t really a technical issue, we need to file whatever bits are necessary to reserve a room at MIT. Getting all set up and going “live” only to have to find a new (but better) home last night was no fun. Of course reserving a room doesn’t truly guarantee that we won’t ever be bumped, but we need to do what we can to reduce these occurrences.
In conclusion, George and I are really excited by the possibilities that this offers us, both to allow “members” the opportunity to attend meetings they might otherwise miss and to possibly grow our reach through the streamcast. Provided we keep our priorities straight, we believe this can be accomplished with minimal negative effect on the live meetings and that the extended reach will be of benefit to the group as a whole. However, we recognize that this may change the “flavor” of the meetings and want to be sure that we all monitor these changes and be sure that they are acceptable to and welcomed by the group as a whole. We hope you will all lend your participation, expertise and support to this effort.

Jeff

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