On Tue, 27 Mar 2012, Murphy, Sandra wrote:
Moderate badness in the Monday meeting was due to my laptop
communication problems. Suggestions welcome as how to handle such a
situation better.
Thank you for asking.
1) First and foremost, delegate the tech issues to two or more persons
who do not have responsibilities to chair, present, scribe, or jabber
scribe. Ideally, find people who are unlikely to be active
participants in the meeting. It's fine to bring in outside help.
2) Have spares for all key hardware. This includes laptops, audio
gear, network gear, network connections, and phone connections.
Cables and power supplies need spares, also -- a dead power supply can
mean a dead laptop. Based on experience in San Diego I suggest having
at least three pieces of all key gear. Have fallbacks in case a
service provider fails: if you're planning to use Meetecho, ALSO have
a WebEx session and a PSTN bridge set up and ready to go.
3) Test both primary and spare hardware and service providers in
multiple combinations prior to the meeting. The more testing you do,
the more you can get away with only a single spare. Testing needs to
happen in the real meeting environment using the same phone lines, net
connections, and audio hardware that will be available during the
meeting. The more removed your testing environment is from the real
meeting environment, the more you need that second spare.
4) When a relatively large number of participants will be in a single
space, provide high-quality microphones. The average Polycom
microphone still sounds like a speakerphone, and listening to people
talking through one all day gives remote participants a clearly
second-class experience. If possible, give every participant his own
microphone (with mute switch!). At the very least, provide a floor or
wireless handheld microphone as we have at the regular IETF meetings
and make sure people use it.
Yes, this is a lot to do. Yes, I'm saying to have three net
connections[1]. Remember, you're not doing this yourself (at least,
not if you're following suggestion #1). In fact, no one person is
stuck with all of this. And "spares" don't have to be
sitting-in-a-box-and-hauled-around-the-world-the-to-be-a-spare: they
can be a meeting participant's personal power brick, so long as you're
sure there's going to be that spare in the room and the person is
willing to part with it should the need arise.
-- Sam
[1] This is based on the San Diego experience where the hotel net
connection was terrible and the backup net was a 4G hotspot. While
both could move some packets, they were not enough to handle both
remote participation and the normal packet-pushing desires of those in
the room. A 3G or 4G device could easily be the backup net, so long
as 1) there is actually service in the meeting space and 2) the device
gives priority to the remote participation traffic and avoids getting
bogged down by routine email checking and web browsing.
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