(virtual) best practices

[Martina.F]

Hi all,

feel free to share your best practices for user group execution (live or virtual) here.

Have fun!

[James_McN]

Hi All,

My tip is more from a presenters perspective. I forgot how awkward it is to present online! You get little or know feedback.

Most platforms have some kind of reactions like thumbs up. Next time I would plan to ask people to use that at various points just to feel like someone is listening!

Also depending on size we managed to have a smaller group discussion using the breakout rooms in Zoom. So we split to groups of 3 to discuss a topic in more details and it felt like that went very well.

Cheers,

James

[Freel]

One thing Joerg Hampel did during his WUELUG09 is creating a second remote meeting BEFORE the actual meeting. This meeting can run from morning until the start of the user group and people can use it to test connections, cameras and microfoons. I found this very handy and it resulted in less people having troubles joining the remote user group meeting. You don't have to manage it, just publish the link and let people do their tests. 

[FabiolaDelaCueva]

We have had remote attendees/ presenters join our LabVIEW Architects Forum for several years now. It is not the same as having everyone be remote but there area things that still apply:

• Mute everyone and ask them to turn off their cameras to help with bandwidth
• Have a dedicated moderator, other than the presenter,  monitor the chat and voice questions for the presenter. Check with the presenter if they want to be interrupted with questions during the presentation or if they want to wait until the end of the presentation
• Mute all microphones except for the presenter and the moderator
• As the host,  place a post it or some other reminder to record the meeting
• As a presenter, if you can have another device connected to the meeting, you can see what everyone else sees,  including video lag. Make sure this other device has both mic and speakers muted

Based on some classes I have been taking online with more than 200 attendees,  I would add this:

• At the end of each presentation or the end of the meeting, do turn on cameras and unmute attendees. It will be a cacophony at the beginning but eventually people start organizing and taking turns to speak.

[ASTDan]

What platform are folks using to host the virtual meeting?

I am looking at Youtube Live.  Any experiences with this?

Thanks

[CJW1800]

Thanks for all the tips!

We are going virtual for our next UG on 10th June and will be using Zoom. We have streamed our last two meetings using YouTube and it has been really effective as people can watch it live, but it is also automatically shared on your channel.

I have read that you can also record a Zoom meeting and then upload it to YouTube, need to test this before our next meeting, but will probably be what we do.

[.aCe.]

We use Microsoft teams and our experience has been very good. We record ours and post it on our YouTube channel too.

We don't do Live Events as this does somewhat restrict interaction. We send out Teams meeting invites, this also allows users outside your organisation to join without much hassle.

Adding to Fabiola's comments, we found that an echo cancelling speaker such as this helped us promote two way interaction.

Just one of these allowed a room of about 30 to interact with others online. (I agree this is not the use case now and it is somewhat expensive but I think it is worth investing in a similar device)

[joerg.hampel]

I've been using Microsoft Teams for a weekly full-day customer meeting for half a year now, and much more often recently, both as a participant (meeting started by customers) and as an organiser. Amongst other things, we did two full consecutive days of remote DQMH training, and we held the latest WUELUG meeting via Teams. The stability and the audio and video quality was perfect nearly all of the time.

For the WUELUG meeting, we posted links to tutorials etc. a few days before the meeting so people could download and install the tool and get familiar with it. As Pascal already mentioned, on the day of the meeting, we had a Teams meeting going the whole day to let people try stuff. The meeting itself went great, only minor technical glitches.

We followed Fab's tips (muting, moderator, etc), they had proven useful before. The presentations went great and forwarding questions from the chat through the moderator worked very well. We all had a mutual feeling afterwards, though, that in this meeting, we could not recreate the snug, homely atmosphere we were used to from our physically held meetings.

So I'm thinking, for the next WUELUG meeting, I'll look for very interactive presentations, and we'll try to do questions/answers right during the presentations, but without chat or moderator. We're aware that this will be an experiment. The general opinion is that we don't need yet another online training - this is first and foremost a social event for all the peeps.

I can't wait to see how it will work out!

[joerg.hampel]

FYI, we've started building out a knowledge base page, based on Fab's tips (thanks again!), and extended by both our own and other people's experiences:

https://dokuwiki.hampel-soft.com/kb/bestpractices/conferencing/tips-and-tricks 

For MS Teams, we offer a landing page to help people get set up:

https://dokuwiki.hampel-soft.com/kb/bestpractices/conferencing/ms-teams 

Feel free to link to it or copy blatantly 🙂