Retrospective on a remote presentation to two simultaneous meetups

[David Moreau Simard]

Hi !

I've been organizing and speaking at local Ansible meetups for a while but this time around I was invited to present remotely to two meetups in France [1][2].

The (french) presentation was recorded and is now available on youtube [3].

It went relatively well and I thought I would retrospect on what we did, what went well and what we'd improve for the next time for the benefit of the other meetup organizers and remote presenters.

We first started discussing by email but it felt difficult to properly synchronize so I ended up creating a Google hangouts chat group.

This was useful for getting quick turnaround and consensus on questions.

Quality of audio and video felt like an important consideration for a remote presentation so we thought about three different options:

• Twitch (with OBS Studio [4])
• Skype
• Bluejeans (provided through Red Hat)
  

We ended up picking Bluejeans, mostly out of simplicity, but it unfortunately had the worst audio/video compression of the three.

We did not go with Skype, mostly because I was not very familiar with it, especially for group calls, but it is known to have good audio/video quality.

A colleague regularly uses Skype inside his Twitch streams but I was not comfortable enough to pick this option -- yet.

Twitch has a steep learning curve and requires some upfront effort to set things up to work right.

It also wasn't the best medium for engaging the audience because it only provides a chat room.

Another thing to consider and keep in mind is that it introduces a slight delay in the stream -- as low as ~5 seconds from what I could tell.

With some practice in OBS Studio, though, you can get something really cool going and I'll definitely consider it again in the future.

We had a meeting on Bluejeans the week before the meetup in order to talk about the logistics, test audio/video, screen sharing, font size, etc.

I used this meeting to get the organizers familiar with Bluejeans and we addressed a few things.

For example, while I work in 1440p, I ended up lowering the resolution to 1080p to minimize the scaling.

Also, when I shared my screen to present, I no longer saw the webcam feeds from the other meetups.

I ended up connecting my smartphone to the bluejeans session -- no audio or video -- just to be able to keep an eye on the attendees (see reactions, raised hands, etc.) and that worked well.

We agreed to start the bluejeans session ~15 minutes prior to the scheduled start of the talk to sort out the audio/video and it was worthwhile to confirm everything was working well, the volume was high enough, etc.

I first thought it would be a good idea to leave the meetup microphones open to have live discussion/questions.

In the end, we had to mute the microphones because the background noise/chatter was too distracting for me. We opened them up at the end for questions.

This was unfortunate for me because I enjoy interacting with the audience during the presentation and I don't mind getting interrupted for questions or discussions -- it now felt a bit more of a long monologue.

The talk was scheduled to last around an hour and we ended pretty much on time despite two live demos and a period of questions.

An unexpected minor issue that I've noticed only when re-watching the recording is that it puts my face at the top left and it hides a small amount of content from certain slides.

The name label also hides up to half of my face which isn't great.

I don't believe this is how the attendees saw the presentation because Bluejeans provides a slider to adjust the size of the screen sharing in relation to the person talking.

Feedback from the organizers and the attendees was great and I'd definitely do something like this again and iterate/improve on how I do it.

Going on a tangent here but something that I've been pondering about is that as soon as the presentation is remote, you can have virtually unlimited attendees.

While there was nothing stopping us from sharing the Bluejeans session more broadly, we didn't and kept this one fairly intimate.

In the end, it worked well... but if remote and recorded presentations are popular, would it end up hurting meetup attendance ? Conference attendance ?

At the same time, if presentations are remote and recorded, it opens up the presentations to a larger audience.

Let me know if you have any questions !

[1]: https://www.meetup.com/Ansible-Paris/events/256317850/

[2]: https://www.meetup.com/Groupe-dutilisateurs-Python-Grenoble/events/256520367/

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlU_QnxRaPA

[4]: https://obsproject.com/

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

Great writeup, thanks!

Do you expect to be doing this again?

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[John Barker]

Hi,

Thanks for this write up, lots of things I've not considered before, great to get all of that written down. 

The "face in the corner" is an annoying feature of BlueJeans.

Never used Twitch, so I'm not sure how it would compare. 

Kind regards, 

John "gundalow" Barker 

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