[governance] What happened with the hubs?

Wed Nov 25 11:18:01 EST 2009

Dear all,

I am very happy to see that the discussion about remote participation has
continued after the IGF and that is has mobilized very active people on this
list, who have provided valuable inputs and suggestions so far. I agree with
most of what has been said. We will be writing a brief and concise report
about remote participation in the IGF 2009 and I hope that we can include
your opinions. A short questionnaire will be created and advertised.

I would like to share with you some objective information about remote
participation this year. Afterwards, I will send another e-mail with some
personal comments about it.

*Webcast:*

- Audio and video transmitted from main session and workshop room 1 (Sinai)

- Audio transmitted from 4 workshop rooms. Until the second day of the event
we had only license to use 5 rooms in Webex. When the other licenses were
given (day 3), we created more 2 rooms, in accordance with the interests of
the hub organizers in particular workshops. We could not create webex rooms
for all workshops because there were not enough volunteers to be remote
moderators (people to be in the computers, receiving the remote questions
and forwarding them to the panel moderators).

- The quality of the webcast has been much better than the year before,
according to the feedback received so far

- During the event we have managed to integrate the webcast inside Webex,
but due to lack of training of remote moderators (Diplo fellows volunteered
on the first day, young Egyptians volunteered from the second day of the
event onwards) some moderators did not know how to proceed to integrate the
webcast

*Interaction:*

- Webex was the official platform for interaction. The licenses to use Webex
were provided by Cisco and a group of amazing Egyptian technicians were
responsible for installing all the necessary infrastructure in the workshop
rooms. Other platform (Elluminate) was used in one workshop and it was
provided by the workshop organizers.

- Interaction through other channels (Twitter, facebook, etc) was
encouraged, but they were not official channels for remote participation in
the IGF

- We had 11 hubs registered. We have constantly been in touch with 8 of them
during the event and they were actively involved. We have not received
feedback from the others.

- In the rooms in which Webex was available people could send questions
through chat

- If people let us know in advance, they could make audio questions and
remote interventions. If the bandwidth was not enough to guarantee quality
of transmission, we asked remote speakers to record their presentations and
send to us. Ginger and Hong Xue made use of this possibility

- In the main session, questions could be sent by e-mail

*Training:*

- Training in the webex platform was provided for hub organizers, on 10/11,
11/11, 12/11 and 13/11. They could choose of these days to participate

- The original idea was to also train remote moderators, but they were not
appointed in advance, so it was not possible to do it. We have tried as much
as possible to provide assistance to the Egyptian volunteers.

I hope that this information will be useful as a snapshot of what we had
available on the ground and to evaluate what has been done and what should
be done to improve remote participation.

Best wishes,

Marília

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 10:43 AM, William Drake <
william.drake at graduateinstitute.ch> wrote:

> Hi
>
> On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:53 AM, Roland Perry wrote:
>
> > In message <1259135395.3296.379.camel at anriette-laptop>, at 09:49:55 on
> Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Anriette Esterhuysen <anriette at apc.org> writes
> >> At one of the workshops I participated in, the 'Development Agenda'
> >> workshop on the 17th organised by Bill Drake, remote participation
> >> worked extremely well.
> >>
> >> This must in large part have to do with Derrick Cogburn's excellent
> >> handling of the process, as well as Bill's sensitivity to the remote
> >> participants, and the fact that it was a three hour workshop which meant
> >> there was sufficient time to include the remote participants.
> >
> > Maybe that's the answer - bringing the audience more positively into the
> picture. When I was on a panel, there was someone monitoring the remote
> participation, and periodically asking if anyone had any comments, but none
> were forthcoming. But that was a room without video - and it was never fully
> clear to me how many of the non-video rooms had an audio-cast.
> >
> >> I also found it helpful as a panellist to have the remote participation
> >> (Eluminate) interface open on my laptop which enabled me to interact
> >> with the remote participants directly.
> >
> > Is that the same application that was running the webcast? (Which had a
> note on it asking on-site people not to use it because of bandwidth issues)?
> Maybe part of the panel preparations should be giving at least the
> chair/moderator a laptop which is pre-registered with the relevant room.
>
> There were two platforms running in parallel.  Derrick arranged to provide
> Elluminate, which included voice, video, chat, and display of the power
> points, but when we arrived we discovered that the host had provided a
> laptop and the standard voice/chat.  Given sound quality issues, we just
> read out all the questions typed in the two chat spaces, as well as the text
> of one panelist who was not able to come to Sharm.
> >
> >> Personally I feel that while there is still a long way to go, remote
> >> participation was much more effective this year than in the previous
> >> IGFs.
>
> Agree with Anriette.
>
> Best,
>
> Bill
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-- 
Centro de Tecnologia e Sociedade
FGV Direito Rio

Center of Technology and Society
Getulio Vargas Foundation
Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
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