High priority:
Reconsider the name of the tool. Clowdr is good, but it seems basically impossible for people to spell: I've seen cloudr, clouder, clowder, crowdr, ...
General UI simplification
- or... what about displaying the last message posted in the rectangle that you can click on to expand the chat. I.e., make minimized chat bottons a bit larger, put their name plus the first few words of the last posting as the button title, and clicking on them maximizes the chat window and shows all the messages?
The UI is overwhelming at the beginning -- need an easier onramp
- maybe more things should be closed by default
- making more use of announcements would help (so that e.g., the lobby chat could start closed)
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See if any more of the user manual can be reflected in popovers -- in general, our goal should be not to have a user manual!
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Describe how to use multiple browser windows effectively (or make it obvious)
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The relation between top-level rooms and breakout rooms within top-level rooms needs to be clarified. (I [BCP] am still confused about it!) Also the relation between ordinary rooms and posters/exhibits.
Medium priority
- If possible, gray out the names of people that have not been active for a while (> 15 min?)
dntWaiver = "Only you can see this status. Others will still see your presence in public rooms, but won't see a status" -- ... But this is the only status that will be displayed as blank, so won't people be able to infer it?
Some kind of scheduling service for participants would be really nice. (Though I wonder whether there is some third-party tool that could be embedded, rather than writing our own. Perhaps something as dumb as a google sheet. Or perhaps not quite so dumb.)
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Clicking the little mic symbol in the upper right of the video display should mute and unmute you.
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rename the "End call" button to "Back to lobby" (BCP: not obvious how to do it -- the button seems to come from from a component library)
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What about live captioning (as an eventual feature)?
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Screen layout nit: When displaying a video chat room on a laptop, it would be good to put other people's videos on the very top of the screen, near the camera!
Are we going to keep the small/large/P2P disctinction? If so, should there be a visual indication of which rooms are which size?
- The Lobby chat got used at ICSE for two things: for general announcements by the organizers, and for chat between participants. IMO it would be good to separate them (e.g., use only the announcement mechanism for announcements -- we'll have to make it a bit less intrusive, though!)
- The schedule needs very explicit "go to the Hallway" times!
- Maybe we should ask student volunteers to hang out in the Hallway rooms when they are not doing something else... seems like it would be good for them, good for the conference, and good for us... :-)
- Should Hallway rooms be large or small?? How many should we create by default? How should we display them so that (a) people can find a particular one if they want to but (b) people are encouraged to join them randomly?
comments from the ICSE discussion https://docs.google.com/document/d/1m0OoLhmlJNYsCfpd0m993UbABu39UWyOUOa538Yt4iw/edit
random comments from a student:
- the virtual clapping soundtrack is excellent!
manual version:
- Lobby session has ten (or more, if we want) breakout rooms, named something obvious like "Looking for conversation #1", etc.
- If you want random conversation, take a look at who is in these rooms and join one if you like.
- Otherwise, park yourself in an empty room and wait for other people to show up.
- Alternatively, roll a ten-sided die and go to the indicated room.
- Done. :-)
almost manual version:
- Same as above, except there's a button at the bottom of the screen when you're in the lobby session that says "Go to a random Looking For Conversation" room. Press the button and it takes you to one of the rooms with this label (that does not have more than four people in it right now).
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First question: How hard would it be to include Sli.do functionality in the talk chat? I think we'd need, at at minimum, (1) to be able to add an annotation to a post marking it as a question for the speaker, (2) a way for other people to "upvote" questions (by adding a thumbs up or something), and (3) a way for session hosts (and maybe everybody) to filter and sort posts to see only questions.
However, having said this, I am actually beginning to wonder whether we need this sort of functionality at all in Clowdr. After all, the plan (at least for ICSE, I believe) is to have essentially all the talks pre-recorded. So authors themselves are going to be watching the chat stream and either they or session chairs can choose which questions and comments to respond to live.
To make the platform flexible, we may well want to support easy integration with sli.do and other such tools, but perhaps this is as easy as a generic "embed such-and-such URL in an iframe when this talk is going on."
Just talking with Richard and he mentioned two ideas for Clowdr:
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"Random" social event. Everyone who signs up gets placed in a random room for a short meet & greet. I guess this is similar to Zoom's breakout room feature, but we should look into how many people this could support at once. A better option would be to let people specify/select a few topics when they sign up that they are interested to increase the chance that the interactions go well.
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Q&A specific video room. Only three video streams allowed at a time: author, current question asker and moderator. Any one who wants to ask a question needs to join the queue and wait for their turn. Any number of people can observe the discussion
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Lots of disagreement about whether lurking is a good thing. Roopsha observed that shy people may have a lot of trouble goijng from lurking to participating mode. She would actually prefer that there NOT be this lurking mode that we've discussed. As she said, perhaops all we need to do is to socialize people so that popping into and out of rooms is considered acceptable, not rude.
This also makes me wonder about different mechanisms for making it easy for people to join rooms. E.g., we could mark rooms when they are created (and indicate when we show them) whether they are "manual join only" or "random join allowed." And then we make a "join a random room" button.
We might need to have a "block this person" feature where, for example, "take me to a random room" would never take me to a room where this person is currently present. Or maybe this is inventing too much mechanism to deal with problems that we don't udnerstand yet.
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Create a “How to get the most out of this virtual experience” document for attendees? Our tips/lessons learned to stay engaged
- Quiet space, write on slack, engage in Disco to actually meet people, …
- Clear out other meetings: you are attending PLMW, trying to do your day job at the same time doesn’t work
- Popping into and out of rooms is fine
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Scheduling: Both the official and especially the unofficial parts of a conference are a gigantic constraint solving problem. It's not so bad when people are onsite because there's a global structure that lots of little things can happen within, serendipitiously. Less good if many more, even informal, things need to be scheduled. We could build some technology to help with this, but I wonder if there is some kind of third-party scheduling tool that we could integrate... Surely this is a common problem?
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There could be multiple ways of using user profile / list of topics / micro-CV information. The obvious one is for search: show a score next to people’s names based on topic similarity, or whatever (I’ve heard that neurips used this idea to do some kind of speed dating thing). A less obvious but perhaps more useful one is for quick introductions: If I’m standing next to someone in a virtual conversation, I can click on their name and see a pop-up window with a little half-page summary of things they want other people to know about them — interests and passions, a few publications, extracurriculars, ….
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"Monopresence": each participant should have at most one place where they "are": i.e., where they are partipating with full attention. Not sure I am sold on this yet, though it's certainly a design principle worth discussing. For example, when we get around to creating our own text chat, I really want to be able to quickly read and respond to occasional text messages in several channels at the same time. Maybe the two wishes can be reconciled by saying that I can be in multiple places in "watching mode" but only one in "participating mode" -- e.g., if I see a chat message I need to respond to, I have to "go" to that chat to do so. (But even this model leaves me "present" in two places in two ways: text and video.)
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"Locatability": What if each attendee could maintain an associated "current status" that would be displayed along with their name (and, when appropriate, current location)? Possible statuses could include
- In a session (i.e., paying attention to something, not interruptable)
- Hanging out (along with maybe a button to DM them on Slack)
- Offline
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One acid test for a flexible platform: The industrial reception
- Another: the "town hall" or business meeting
- Another: Posters
- Other receptions
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(Benjamin) I really liked some aspects of the “attenuated A/V” thing that Gather does when someone is joining a group, or is nearby but hasn’t joined it yet. I still want to experiment with finding an analog of this in the 1d metaphor. E.g., what if each room had a “center” and a “lobby”, and you had to explicitly choose which to be in... Only people in the center can talk, but everybody can see and hear the peopler in the center. The people in the lobby are also visible, but a bit grayed out (or smaller, or something), and not audible.
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(Benjamin) Should the chat history be readable by new participants joining the room? I can imagine either choice being reasonable. Maybe we want to allow this to be configured when the room is created (and make sure that, at any time, it is obvious who will be able to see any given chat message both now and in the future).
(Crista) It can be configurable. But config vars make things less natural. A good rule of thumb is this: if it's a named channel, then the chat history is available for newcomers; if it's not a named channel, and it's just an ad-hoc group chat, then newcomers will only see messages from the time at which they join. Named channels are persistent spaces, they exist beyond the people there.
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From the Eurosys blog post: In a virtual environment, the “activation threshold” for conversations may be higher (e.g., grad students may feel even less comfortable initiating a conversation with a senior researcher than in person), so there may be a larger role for semi-structured forms of interaction like pairing students with mentors.
How do the participants in an ongoing conversation signal that it is OK for you to join?
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what if each room had a “center” and a “lobby”, and you had to explicitly choose which to be in? Only people in the center can talk, but everybody can see and hear the peopler in the center. The people in the lobby are also visible (to all), but a bit grayed out (or smaller, or something), and not audible.
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Slack is problematic for structuring discussion about many talks: e.g. for REMS-DeepSpec, there was one slack channel and the organizers sent a message for each talk, which people were asked to use to ask questions. This worked sort-of OK, but as the day wore on it became increasingly hard to find the pinned talk threads.
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In the top-level Lobby view, each room says "No data" under the title.
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It's a bit weird to arrive at an empty room and notice that I can view the transcript of earlier conversations in that space in the chat. The video and chat modalities raise conflicting expectations.
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Using a Slack DM to get someone's attention in Clowdr doesn't always work very well! More generally, there is (expectedly) a big problem with focus of attention!
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It would be so helpful to have a timezone converter constantly visible (e.g., a little clock in the corner displaying the current time in the "conference timezone"). Yes, people can set up their own, but I think it might also help lend a sense of cohesion to the program.
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Change "Not following" to "Follow"
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Names don't display for audio-only participants
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Sound quality is not fantastic -- lots of crackling, distortion, dropouts, etc. (Zoom has spoiled us, I'm afraid.) Also, the "speaker override" feature seems quite heavy. Rooms with very many people did not work well.
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When I join a room I seem to get a huge dump of notifications for that room.
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The activity notification is way too distracting
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GUI jumps all over the place when people come and go. And I think the sound disruptions tend to happen then too.
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Room contents in the list on the left should definitely be minimized by default
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We need a way of garbage collecting persistent rooms; otherwise there are going to be hundreds of them!
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I wasn't sure what the connection quality indicator meant. Maybe we should try to use the semi-circular wifi icon?
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People with bad connections sounded WAY worse than they do on Zoom.
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Lots of people got the Insufficient Bandwidth thing
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Could not figure out how to get back to the top-level lobby (with all the rooms displayed in the middle of the screen) except at the very beginning when I arrive from slack. (And why didn't I arrive in the foo room if I said "/video foo" to slack?)
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The current speaker should be identified visually (especially if they are audio-only).
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Different aspect-ratio videos get displayed in different size thumbnails (this is distracting)
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What's the recommended procedure for creating a new room and inviting someone to go there.
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maybe we can make the little photo thumbnails smaller to conserve vertical real estate when the list of rooms and people in rooms gets longer?
This seems very preliminary! They seem full of ideas, but not ready for prime time.
The spatialized audio is a mixed blessing. If you're close to two conversations, you'll hear both of them, but the people on the far ends of a single conversation can't necessarily hear each other.
The 2d metaphor is actually makes it quite hard to figure out who is where (or even to figure out what the map looks like).
Users ICLR used it as a social space (they put it together the night before!) 60-70 people in the room at the same time (they had been using rocketchat, but this is better) SIGMOD is upcoming
they've been working on this for a total of nine weeks!
talking to a bunch of other July / Aug conferences
Alex, Phillip, Saleem, ...
They rely on firebase, which doesn't work in china