[EURO-Discuss] Guide-to-effective-participation-in-virtual-meetings

[Michiel Leenaars]

Dear Sandra,

thanks for this guide, very useful! I have some suggestions:

- the recommendation to use a camera is not uncontroversial. Not 
everyone lives under economic and personal circumstances where it is 
feasible to expose their personal living space to others for a long 
period of time. The pandemic circumstances make it difficult to move 
outdoors. By making the use of a camera the norm, essentially people can 
feel socially pressured and awkward if they do not turn on the camera.

- Livestreaming and recording events makes that even worse. People 
should always have the possibility to view their own recording before it 
is made public for eternity. And inform the host that they do not wish 
to be recorded, preferably anonymously. Video streams could then be 
removed from the edited recording.

- Also, if people are streaming with their wonderful flagship device 
high resolution camera from their well-designed urban loft, others with 
less bandwidth and less recent hardware might have a bad meeting because 
of that. Bandwidth limitations are a collective property, not just how 
an individual is connected. There is definitely something to be said for 
teleconferences, even given the ubiquity of camera's we find ourselves 
today the value we had in those for the last decades is not gone just 
yet. The moderator can help to assure that everything is broadly 
understood, and can provide e.g. notes in the chat.

- I would think that a similar best practices guide for host 
organisations would be very welcome. Most notably in the use of privacy 
respecting, cross-platform tools, providing real-time text and 
transcriptions. I find the trend that people are forced to download 
proprietary apps that send their biometric data (video, voice) abroad, 
merely to participate in public events disturbing. Desktop apps like 
Cisco webex or Zoom have proven to be a security risk [1] [2], and are 
not equally available to all. WebRTC based, open source solutions like 
Jitsi, Sylk and BigBlueButton that can be hosted by oneself or 
trustworthy parties deserve more attention.

- For translation of the document, you could look at an open source tool 
like weblate [3] to manage the flow. Maintaining translations of a 
living document with multiple languages without translation memory is 
very tiring, and unnecessarily exhausts translators - not for the first 
translation, but for incremental ones.

Hope this helps!

Kind regards,
Michiel Leenaars

[1] https://cybersecuritynews.com/cisco-webex-meetings/
[2] 
https://blog.0patch.com/2020/07/remote-code-execution-vulnerability-in.html
[3] https://weblate.org

> Dear all, I announced it already at some occasions, and we are happy
> to share with you now the
> "Guide-to-effective-participation-in-virtual-meetings" in English and
> German. This guide was drafted with support from the German Ministry
> of Economics and Energy, the host of last year's IGF.
> 
> You can download and share widely under the creative common licence CC
> BY-SA.
> 
> German:
> https://medienstadt-leipzig.org/Leitfaden-zur-effektiven-Teilnahme-an-virtuellen-Meetings.pdf
> English:
> https://medienstadt-leipzig.org/Guide-to-effective-participation-in-virtual-meetings.pdf
> 
> We would be happy to find volunteers who translate it into other
> languages and provide us with the translation. We can then adapt the
> layout and provide the webspace for download.