Initial VCC 11-15-2020

so we we tried it but
things kind of blew up that way
i guess it sounds like yours was worse
well it was a live event rather than a
virtual event but it would have been a
problem either way
i guess um and john you want to chime in
on this as well because this is kind of
your wheelhouse but
but if it was me i probably would have
switched to hard caps
for distribution um so
so if i was if whatever i was doing sort
of to begin
to the front end of the pipeline um once
it gets split up and sent out to the
various
um distribution networks whether it be
youtube or facebook or wherever twitch
what have you
um other services are available rather
than tripping up over those kinds of
problems i probably would have
reached for something which would make
them hard caps at that point
so they’re part of the part of the
stream
actually i was just going to ask a vox
pop apart from keith who i know was
there
how many people attended this year’s um
sf worldcon con zealand
anybody okay
well that that was that was massive
massive amounts of cutting down the
jungle because we virtualized the
convention from
a standing start without any idea how
many people were going to be there
without any idea what were the right
tools with
a whole whole heap of requirements um
so part of what i’m here for is to find
out what is state of the art
um gee it’s seven months
seven months later since i started
virtualizing conzealand
and that ended up being 2 000 people and
about 20 track 20 parallel tracks of
programming
and major events and da da da da and
we we had some very important
requirements on captioning
some of which we delivered some of which
we couldn’t
uh this is maria new york one of the
large issues we had at dublin worldcon
was our captioning and some of the
uh interpretation got
misinterpreted and it created huge
things
huge problems and i know that during
uh concealing a lot of those issues were
fixed
and and and i hope that um for
dc next year which is most likely going
to be a hybrid
convention we can work on those again
and one of my areas is actually
working on audio translations
real-time audio and closed captioning
not available
if you have an option to not do them
they will be a hundred percent right a
hundred percent of the time
it tells you something it will so so so
when asking
not captioning at all and just maybe
using an interpreter
um there’s a
a company i know of that does uh
interpretations
specifically through four zoom call type
things um my wife actually just got
interviewed by that company but like
it’s the only reason i found out they
existed but yeah so they do asl and
other ones
uh they do uh spanish language as well i
believe but yeah so it’s
like a add-on service you can put into a
thing but you can add it into your
conference package
uh to have live interpreters i know that
you’re
uh at san jose and at uh in dc next year
there’s actually a a physical human
on staff to do interpretations uh
captioning i should say
my bad and we’re not probably not going
to use any type of programming but it’s
the translation
of since we’re going to most likely be
i mean it is a world con this time it’ll
be easy
for people all over the world to come i
think
so so when you say translation do you
mean from
one language into another or from one
format into another
so so i i use it for both and so i
should clarify
translation being from speech to visual
or one one one medium to another
and then there’s the translation for
language
so yeah okay um it’s
9 55 so i’m going to end this meeting
so the recording resets and
just log in back in in a minute
hi hey jay you can just
stop the recording yeah you can just
stop the recording jay
oh and then it makes a brand new
recording yes
yes yeah make sure you hit stop and not
pause
okay
you’re gonna have you have to go for
mcdonald’s
okay good so great that solves one
problem
it doesn’t it doesn’t solve another
problem though uh which is
i attended a three-day virtualized
convention last week
getting up at much the same stupid times
because it was run out of
new york and it doesn’t solve the
problem of you need to allow people time
to get up
run to the toilet and get back well
yeah i got five minutes between sessions
at least
we typically have done and you know
bouncing off what jj
or janja said we typically do um
either two or three full day eight hour
days and
we were running um two 15-minute breaks
a day
and the complaint was the brakes weren’t
long enough at 15 minutes
correct so especially if you’re
you know doing it across a a global
time range um we were starting at 11
so that our la people wouldn’t have to
get up at the crack of dawn
and starting at 11 you know it’s it’s an
interesting
time for the east coasters because it’s
right before lunch
so you know just plan accordingly you
know based on what your time zones look
like and you can
typically figure it out good morning
from sydney where it’s coming up to 5
a.m
exactly i have no sympathy
or keith who is in london
on this particular occasion if
holiday services which on yom kippur is
a full day
and normally people are there and they
choose when
they want to get come in and out of
hearing
the service and there’s not scheduled
breaks as much
normally and we went digital you know we
went online this year so we
we built in like those 15-minute breaks
but left the zoom room open had a
picture
played some music just so people
got the idea that they can and in our
promotion of it
we said that you can come in and out as
needed
but what i learned the other day is even
though you
try to educate people that they can turn
off their camera
older members might not remember that
and we had an interviewer they muted her
mic but took her ipad with her into the
bathroom
um thank god speaker view uh did not
record that
and we were kind of wondering why she
was going into that room
until she kind of flipped her skirt up a
little bit
um thankfully not recorded
um so i think sometimes it’s it’s the
education
that people who aren’t normally online
need for you can close your camera you
can take
your own break when needed
let me tell you there’s nothing more
music good morning or good afternoon
uh let me tell you there’s nothing more
amusing when the
public tv uh pledge host or something
like that
with their wireless mic walks into the
loo without muting it
now the sound operator should be muting
it
but that doesn’t mean they won’t be
listening to it
i don’t know i think i think you know
having a yom kippur service and somebody
going off for a meal break you know that
could be
annoying
votes over forms a new vlog
so it wasn’t necessarily a meal break
there are parents that are taking care
of kids and things like that or bathroom
breaks
you know just bathroom breaks are fine
that that you can
go away from your screen
or take that break to to walk around
um but it was it was both building
in you know what we felt was a
sufficient
break time for people to get up and
stretch or
or take care of themselves or others
um and and then letting people know that
you know you can close your camera and
no one will see you
okay it’s time for
rachel rivermore’s presentation
um he actually did the
ineffable card and
just turn it over to her okay
all right um oh could you enable
participant screen sharing please
oh sorry um
livermore
um okay so hello i’m
very happy to be opening this with um
my experience running the ineffable com2
which was last month
we used a platform called excel events
so that is what i’m going to talk about
but i’m
going to be mostly talking about like
general things to look for when looking
for platforms
um things that we really liked things we
didn’t like rather than that specific
product because i think
after watching this talk no one here is
going to use excel events
so um i am rachel livermore
um my real life background is in science
i just run conventions for fun so like a
lot of people here
i do science fiction and fantasy things
i focus on the very niche
like single fandom events so that’s what
this one is this was a good omens
convention
just started last year and this was our
very second one
and we had to figure out how to go
online
so same problems a lot of people here
have had
so a little bit about me because i think
i only know one person on this call
so this is me dressed as war if you’re
not familiar with good omens that’s you
know one of the four horse people of the
apocalypse
i’ve chaired six conventions now and
this was my first one online
i used to be treasurer of the talking
society that’s how i got into con
running in the first place
i’ve also worked to staff on various
conventions of different types from a
few hundred to a few thousand
people um the ones i’ve chaired like i
said i focus on the really niche single
fandoms so they tend to be smaller the
largest one
um i chaired was 537 people
in real life this one that we did online
was 661 people
so very first time going online and the
largest one i’d ever done
as chair so that was scary um all
non-profit all run by volunteers
so a lot of the same problems are faced
by other fan conventions and other low
budget things
um one thing about having run kind of
these small single fandom things is i’ve
become used to working with very small
committees and when i say small i mean
two people
there was only one other person on this
committee which was my co-chair bethany
who was in the room and can hear you um
she
had only ever been to one convention
before which was the ineffable con last
year which is where she met me now she’s
stuck living with me
um she does organize events
professionally though
however she asked me to say that she is
not at all tech savvy
so this was important when we were
looking into platforms and things that
we needed things that were very easy to
use
she mostly dealt with the social media
and customer service side which is the
bit that i cannot do
so that was great so the event to give
you an idea of the kind of requirements
we had
it was following an in-person convention
last year which was
much smaller um we launched in may 2020
so we did have the advantage that we
knew from the get-go we were going to be
virtual we didn’t have to
pivot an existing event with an existing
budget
it was from friday the 16th to sunday
the 18th of october so right about a
month ago
we ended up charging 25 pounds per
ticket we did have a financial
assistance scheme which i’ll mention
a bit later we used the excel events
platform
which i’m going to talk about and we
ended up with 661 registrations and it
hurts my soul that we couldn’t get five
more that would have been really great
um so what we were looking for
in a platform um we had run some virtual
events like parties previously we
actually had a physical party planned
for the 2nd of may for the 30th
anniversary of good omens which we
pivoted to zoom
so we knew that we did not want to do it
on zoom
i am going to talk a bit about zoom
later on um we had 500 people at that
party on the 2nd of may
um this was before zoom brought in the
function to allow people to move freely
between breakout rooms so we had to do
all of the moving
and then eventually you get to a point
we just have to make everyone a co-host
so they can move and it was a nightmare
it worked but we wanted to die
afterwards so we did not want that
um we knew that we had an audience that
was
much bigger than you would have for an
in-person event because it’s a worldwide
fandom it’s very niche so people don’t
have an equivalent thing locally they
can go to
um so that gives us a time zone issue
so we knew that we wanted live talks and
panels obviously like any event
but we wanted the recordings to be
available on demand with minimal work
required from us
um so that people in other time zones um
we’re based in the uk
we had obviously a lot of people from
europe huge contingent from the u.s and
south america
but also massive contingent from the
philippines randomly
um also japan australia new zealand so
every time zone imaginable
so we wanted people to be able to watch
things on their own schedule
we wanted exhibitor booths at our
physical conventions we tend to have art
shows dealers
rooms so we wanted to be able to
replicate that as much as possible
but our events are primarily social
they’re mostly about hanging out with
like-minded people and chatting
so we wanted to be able to replicate
that as much as we could
we were also interested in accessibility
which i’m going to talk about in more
detail
but of course we’re on a budget which
i’m also going to talk about in a bit
more detail
and we wanted something that was very
easy to use there were only two of us
one of us is not very tech savvy
i can code but we had no time we
launched in may the event was in october
i didn’t have time to write something
from scratch
so accessibility this is obviously a
thing that any event organizer thinks
about but it’s different online rather
than thinking about wheelchair ramps and
accessible bathrooms
you’re thinking about mostly deaf hard
of hearing people
so this brings me on to subtitles which
we were chatting about a bit earlier
um i very quickly found out that none of
the platforms certainly within our price
bracket have figured out live closed
captions
it’s just not an option um the only way
you can get live closed captions closed
captions meaning you can switch them on
and off
um is by going via youtube which doesn’t
work
um you can’t put youtube videos behind a
paywall it’s a gate set terms or service
and it’s also not possible to hide the
direct youtube link even if it’s
unlisted anyone can post that on social
media and
then your paywall’s gone so the best
option we could come up with
was to use open captions that is hard
coded on the video
within zoom there are some services that
provide automated captions in zoom
but if you’re just using zoom for your
speakers and then you’re streaming to an
outside platform
all of these live closed caption
services use the rtmp stream
you can only have one rtmp stream from a
zoom call
so you can’t do that you can do fancy
things where you set up it going
via a third-party bit of software like i
said there were two of us
and we were running two parallel streams
constantly all day
that wasn’t an option we needed
something easy
the thing with captions being hard-coded
is they really have to be good
so i’d say even if we had found an
automated caption system that would work
i would be really wary of it we’ve all
seen events where
the entire event gets derailed by people
laughing at how bad the captions are
we did do a test with replay media’s um
automated captions while we were
considering that as an option
and i don’t remember what i was talking
about i think i was just having a
general discussion about technicalities
of streaming from zoom
these captions were obsessed with dick
cheney he came up like three times
within one paragraph and i have no idea
why if that had been a live event
people would have been laughing about
dick cheney and not listening to what i
was saying
so if you’re going to have open captions
they got to be good
so we used live human captioners this
was an education i’ve never done this
before i learned that there are two
types of live human captioners
there are what they call re-speakers who
just
re-speak everything that you say into
another microphone they’re obviously
trained to speak very clearly and they
say the punctuation and everything
but it’s still ultimately an ai that
translates that into words
so it’s not great for names and all that
sort of thing the other option
is the human stenographers so this is
like court reporters it’s usually what
they train as
who are typing on a stereography machine
that’s what we wanted
so we went with mycleartext other
companies are available this is a uk
based one which was important to us
because of the time zones
you’re looking for most of these
companies at starting rates of 200
pounds an hour
or a bit over 200 an hour um so this is
expensive
for a low budget event so for both cost
reasons
and the personnel reasons because for
this we were going to have to use zoom
and stream to a platform
which means starting a zoom call getting
everyone on starting the captioning
starting the streaming um we decided to
only do this for special guests
so we had eight panels who were special
guests this is what it looks like
so this is one of our special guest
panels with neil gaiman douglas mckinnon
and rob wilkins
and the captions show up like this
so you have them come up in your zoom
people within zoom can switch them on
and off
but then when you’re streaming they’re
just hard-coded on the video
so that’s how we did that all of our
other panels
anyone who wasn’t a special guest did
not have captions live
um we then had volunteers um
transcribing them afterwards so we used
an automated system called otter
to provide a first draft transcript and
then we had humans go in edit it fix all
the silly mistakes
and then we added the subtitles to the
recorded videos afterwards
so not ideal and i think this is the
biggest thing that i would really like
to be able to fix
in future um there is another side to
the
accessibility coin which is financial
accessibility
so um we realized early on
that obviously whenever you run an event
there are always people
who would like to come to your event but
have financial hardship for whatever
reason
but more so than ever in 2020 there are
a lot more people who have suddenly lost
their jobs
but also opening up to the world um
we realized that 25 pounds which was
where we set our ticket price
is small change to someone who’s used to
attending a physical event especially if
you’re not thinking about travel and
hotels
but you’re if you sell that in like
parts of central and south america
thailand philippines this is suddenly an
awful lot of money
um even to someone who has a decent job
so
we wanted those people to be able to
come we figured this supposed to be a
fun event 2020 has sucked enough without
people
feeling shut out of something and we
wanted to help
but the platform we went with charges
per person so we didn’t have the option
to just say all right costs are covered
everyone else come on in
so what we did is we set up a system
where people who could could donate
we matched all the donations so
essentially charged 50
for the ticket price and then anyone who
needed to could apply
um we did this on the honor system which
is the way that fan conventions are
generally leaning
we don’t want to be asking for proof of
unemployment and all that nonsense um
the general system is if you feel like
you need it then
you can have it the only information we
required from people was a contact email
so we could send them information on how
to register
um we managed to raise 874 pounds from
that people were really really generous
and so we got 64 people able to come who
wouldn’t otherwise have been able to
which was really great um so the really
great thing about this was it made the
convention accessible
people who got free spots then wanted to
give something back so they were more
likely to volunteer at the event which
was great
and it’s you know good pr because we
were visibly trying to help people
attend
um concerns we did have a worry that
people would take advantage that’s
always a worry when you do anything on
an honor system
but we were particularly worried because
being a virtual event you don’t
necessarily have
the sense of community and kind of
social peer pressure you might have at a
physical event
and obviously there’s a limit to the
funding as it happened we were able to
fund everyone who applied which was
great
um i do feel like there were some people
who maybe
took advantage of us um we only had over
the entire event
three people who didn’t show up to
something they were supposed to do and
they were all
on these free tickets so we did wonder
if maybe they didn’t feel as invested
but then on the flip side we had a
number of people who applied for these
free tickets who then
dived in they were on panels they
volunteered they ran games
and i think i wouldn’t want to sacrifice
that in order to prevent
the bad side so i think overall it was
worth it
a brief thing about budget i’m whizzing
through this because i have so much
so i’m going for the kind of surface
level everything gets some talking
points and then we can discuss it
offline afterwards um so generally the
problem that fan conventions have
is it’s a social event work is not
paying for it so you can’t price it as
high as a corporate event
um you can’t charge hundreds well
welcome can
other conventions can’t charge hundreds
for their tickets
um it’s non-profit so we’re not looking
to make money we just need to cover our
expenses
but it’s really difficult to budget when
you have no idea how many people are
going to show up
because this was our first time going
virtual we kind of had this inkling
because of the party we’d run
in the spring that a lot of people might
come but of course that was free
this wasn’t so we weren’t really sure
and how do you budget for anything when
this is your registration curve
so we had to base all of our costs on
that first peak
at the end of may which is when we
launched that first night we got
almost all of the registrations we would
see for the next few months
and then a massive flood in the last
couple of weeks
including people registering during the
event and at that point you’re like well
welcome but i can’t do anything with
your money
so it’s a nightmare um it was really
difficult to do
um it did help that we ended up going
with a platform that charged per person
so our fixed costs were not very high
um but the problem with all these people
registering last minute is because we
were having to be cautious
it’s our own money on the line we ended
up with way more surplus than we would
have planned for which is great we’re
donating all that to charity it’s going
to alzheimer’s research uk in memory of
said terry pratchett
about 10 000 pounds from this one event
which is quite nice
so the options we looked at i think this
is probably what people are most
interested in we were looking for a
platform
that would be as easy to use as possible
that would have all the features we
wanted so these are the features
needs to be within our budget we need to
be able to have social space
we need to be able to talk some panels
that will be available recorded
afterwards
and we need exhibitor booths so the
first one is the name everyone’s heard
of
vfairs um we noped out of that phone
call within about
30 seconds as soon as they gave us their
prices
if you have tens of thousands of pound
slash dollars to blow
by all means um having been
to a v fares event now or seen one um
that bethany was at
i wouldn’t necessarily say it was money
well spent but they have at least been
in the market for a while and presumably
everything works not an option for us
though
um same with hoppin they’re actually
pretty
reasonably priced if you’re just doing a
one day event
as soon as you go over 24 hours it’s
suddenly way outside of our budget you
have to go for their super pro
membership which is like 18 000 a year
or something
v conference online were really annoying
they make you sit through a webinar
before you get their pricing document
so um that was fourteen thousand dollars
i believe also outside of our budget
um would have done everything if we had
that kind of money
so the next one i went to was run the
world this was a new startup just
started in february
based in silicon valley i believe very
reasonably priced they have
a percentage option which for a
non-profit i think was 15
of our ticket prices but they were very
new so they basically only had
the talks and panels set up they didn’t
have exhibitor booths
and there wasn’t really any way to
integrate social spaces
i am going to add the massive caveat
that i was interviewing platforms in
april and may and a lot of these have
developed hugely since then so this
might not still be true
um the next one i tried was nunify which
i believe was based in india
they were really nice set up a meeting
did a full demo of the platform
reasonably priced had most of the
features
the warning bell for me was that if you
have more than one speaker in a session
you can’t share your screen
so that was a deal breaker
spot me was a bit of a weird platform
they’re a social media platform that has
added virtual events as a bit of an
afterthought
they kind of rubbed me up the wrong way
by starting this is just a one-on-one
meeting
they said what kind of event are you
running i told them and made very clear
it’s social it’s not at all corporate
and they went full in on all the
corporate spiel so that kind of pissed
me off
um they were um how much were they
i want to say 6 000 pounds so at the
time
that was too much for us we ended up
spending that
but at the time we had no idea how many
people were going to have
and in order to hedge um we would have
had to set our ticket price way too high
so we did not go with that umbrella is a
weird one they’re based
i forget i want to say scandinavia
um rather say sweden or finland can’t
remember sorry
um they were very reasonably priced but
they don’t actually
host any content on their servers
they just provide the kind of website
set up and then
you embed videos from youtube this
wasn’t really an option for us
because we you as i said you can’t put
youtube videos behind a paywall
and we needed to charge to cover all
these other costs
um also the exhibitor booths they do
have them but you have to send all the
information for the booth to them
rather than have exhibitors set them up
themselves and that just seemed like an
awful lot of hassle
so that finally brings me to excel
events and i’m kind of
cringing now as i look at this because
even with the benefit of hindsight it
was the right choice they were the only
one who ticked all our boxes
but i’m going to go on to some huge
caveats here
um they were very reasonably priced it’s
20
of the ticket price or three dollars per
person per day
um so we were a three day event so
effectively nine dollars per person
um it’s the higher of the two of those
um
they have all the talks and panels they
have a variety of different
streaming methods which i’m going to
talk about they had all the exhibitor
booths which exhibitors could set up
themselves
they had social spaces but this is all
in theory
this is what they demoed to me what we
got is
an entirely different thing so excel
events
is a platform we went with it was the
only one within our budget
that at the time i was looking in may
could do everything we wanted to do
it was originally designed as a
fundraising system so the first thing
you do when you’re about to choose a
platform that you’re going to spend
thousands of pounds with
is you go looking for reviews all of the
reviews were about their fundraising
platform
they do like um a electronic thing for
doing live auctions and raffles and that
sort of thing
and that seems to work fine but there
were no reviews
at all of their virtual events platform
because it was that new there are now
um turns out the reason they had all
these features is that they rushed them
out really quickly at the start of the
pandemic with no testing
and it was incredibly buggy um we
so many bugs and really poor customer
service
i’d say the thing that characterized our
relationship with excel events the most
is we would report a bug which any other
tech company would say thank you very
much for bringing that to our attention
they get defensive and their immediate
response is denied and i deny so they’ll
tell you that you imagined it
that you’re faking it anything to avoid
acknowledging that they have a problem
um and yeah i ended up losing my temper
several times
it was so frustrating we did run a
successful event with them
and i hope that a lot of the issues we
encountered were not visible to people
who attended the event
but i really cannot overstate how much
work it was and how much it almost
destroyed us
to make this event happen um in a way
that we wanted it to
so i’m going to give you a brief tour of
the accelerant system
um this is really just to highlight
things you should look for in another
platform i’m going to put great big
labels on everything i say
don’t use this platform it was a
nightmare maybe in a year
if they fix all the bugs maybe but not
right now
um so this is where you set up your
event it’s all very simple
so this is what we were looking for
right you put in the name of the event
when it starts and ends
what kinds of sessions you want i’m
going to talk about that in a bit
because that’s actually not
obvious you set up a logo and then
everything works you can set up your
event website so you have a web page
within excel events
that acts as like a front page for
people visiting if you don’t have your
own website
you can change the color scheme add
pictures
whatever you want it automatically fills
in your program once you make sessions
visible
and then you can set up the virtual
event hub so this is the
site people go to when they’re actually
attending the event you can have a
welcome message pop up i decided that’d
be really annoying so that’s why that’s
all blank i didn’t do that
but you can have there’s a feed in the
lobby which i’m going to show you you
can
set that so that attendees can’t post in
it which means you’re using it as a
bulletin board
um you have you can put links in the
sidebar and everything so that’s all
very easy to set up
this is what it looks like on the front
end this is the website people go to
you have a join now button which lets
them register
and then enter event to actually get
into the event once they’ve registered
um one thing that’s a bit weird i took
this screen cap
just today or yesterday so obviously our
events already happened
if your event is more than 30 minutes in
the future you don’t get the enter event
button
but the way they’ve coded it is kind of
backwards so instead of saying
if less than 30 minutes show button
they’ve said if more than 30 minutes
hide button
so when you first load the page the
enter event button shows up for like a
second and then it vanishes
so we had you know an hour or so before
our event people were going to this page
seeing this enter event button that
appears and then vanishes and then
emailing us in a panic saying what’s
wrong what’s wrong why can’t i get in
and that took up a huge amount of our
time on the first day of our event when
we’re trying to get things ready we’re
answering all these queries don’t worry
it will show up when there’s 30 minutes
to go and so like just before our event
started i had to be editing our website
to put this notice everywhere saying
don’t worry the button will be there and
there’s 30 minutes to go
it was a bit of a nightmare um this is
the virtual event hub
some people enter your event this is
what they see
you have some tabs here in the lobby the
feed
is kind of like facebook posts but with
no comments
so we use that as a bulletin board to
alert people
to any changes or links or anything the
full program is available there there’s
an info desk
where you can add faqs i think i’ve got
a slide on that
and then you could have a custom tab
which we used for our code of conduct
on the sidebar you’ve got links to all
the things in the program so this is
where the distinction between sessions
gets really weird
um the sessions they have there’s main
stage
which is you know a panel or a talk
there’s breakout session which is
identical to main stage
except that you can only have one main
stage thing at a time whereas you can
have parallel breakout sessions
then there’s networking which is the
kind of speed dating thing that
a lot of these systems are using where
once you go into the session you get
randomly paired with someone for a
one-on-one video call for like two
minutes or something and then it
switches over to another person
we thought about using that as a kind of
mixing
thing but we tested it we did two test
cons
we tried it at the first one and the
splash screen that comes up at the
beginning was so riddled with typos
that we decided we would just be
embarrassed to use it so we didn’t
um so that’s why networking is not on
the sidebar
there’s also workshops which are
sessions that when you join you’re on
voice and video
so that’s what you would use for kind of
social spaces and anything that you want
to be interactive
but i’m going to talk about why that’s
not there as well then there’s
exhibitors which you see the booths
which i’ll show in a moment people will
show you everyone who’s registered for
the event
if you’re down to give a talk there’s a
my talks button and
if you’re using the built-in system you
go in there and you’re in the backstage
area you can start broadcasting that’s
all very easy in theory
and then if you’re an exhibitor you have
a my booth button
which lets you edit your booth so in
theory all very easy
so the good things on the back end it’s
very easy to set up a new event
very easy to customize on the front
event as front end it automatically
creates your event website and virtual
event hub
but downsides oh this was a nightmare
so we set up this event at the end of
may
um at the end of june it was like the
19th of june it was the night before i
was moving house
um it suddenly blasted and emailed
everyone who had registered
saying your event starts tomorrow and it
turns out the way they’d coded their
system
is to schedule that email for one month
after you set up the event
not for the night before your event
starts i have no idea why there was no
warning to us that this was going to
happen
the first we heard of it was people
emailing us in a panic saying what do
you mean it starts tomorrow i thought it
was in october
the night before i was moving house that
was like the worst night of the year was
horrible
bad things on the front end i mentioned
the weirdness with the enter event
button that was very strange
so setting up registrations again in
theory very easy
on the back end you can customize your
registration form add custom questions
you can see some of ours there
we added a question about accessibility
about being on program that sort of
thing
um you can also so you can use
the excel events generated event website
we had our own website
so we wanted to embed the registration
within our own website
and they provide a way to do that you
can set up this thing here so this gives
you
tickets and then we had our exhibitor
booth add-ons
and then there’s just a copy this code
and it embeds
as an iframe within your website um we
tried that
but the form that embeds within your
website is really badly formatted
it had like labels over running text
boxes and things it was horrible
so we didn’t want to use that but they
also have a button
and you can just embed the button in
your website and that does the form as a
pop-up and that looked much better so we
did that
excuse me um that was a bit of a
nightmare though so this is how it
looked on our website
first of all the background of our
website is not white and you can’t
customize the background of the button
so that annoyed me
um but other than that for anyone who’s
not me that’s probably not a big issue
the bigger issue is i mean this is a
static screenshot so you can’t see it if
you actually load the page on our
website
it takes a couple of seconds for this
button to show up
so you sometimes get people loading it
going oh wait there’s nothing there
and then sometimes it actually doesn’t
come up at all and there’s no warning
that anything’s gone wrong it’s just not
there so you’ve got click the button
below
and then there’s no button so that’s why
i had to add this text
button not loading try this link and
then the link takes you straight to the
excel event site
that was really annoying and it’s one of
the bugs we reported to excel events
that they refused to believe existed
for months we finally got to the bottom
of it when we realized it happens if you
have cookies disabled
so anyone in incognito mode in chrome
was having this issue
and um yeah it was really annoying that
we had to figure that out ourselves that
excel events couldn’t figure out
what was going on and didn’t seem to
care
um once you register you get an
automated email you can
customize the email to a point you can
change what’s in this text
you deliberately can’t read the text
because it’s not interesting so you can
change what appears in there
you can’t change the overall layout so
this the swoopy blue thing the hi rachel
you’re ready to go that’s
you can’t change that um that’s a bit
annoying you can’t change the fact that
the
end of the email says thanks exclamation
mark excel events
which is not how a british person would
sign off an email um
and also we didn’t want it to be from
excel events we wanted it to be from us
you can’t change that that was a bit
annoying but
minor issues at least it sends an
automated email that’s nice
so good things it was easy to create
discount codes
um so this is how we did our free ticket
scheme um so everyone shows up as the
same ticket type then you just sent them
a discount code to make it free
you can also have hidden ticket types so
we did that for our special guests
so they could register directly um
you can add custom registration fields
that’s really easy although i will say
if you then delete a registration field
it deletes it from everyone who has
previously registered you lose that data
that’s annoying
so make sure you download a spreadsheet
anytime you change anything um it does
send an automated confirmation email
you can attach pdf tickets but i don’t
know why you would for a virtual event
um you could customize it to a point oh
and it links to your stripe account so
that’s how you get the money
um they slice their 20 off before you
get it it goes direct to you through
stripe
and then they bill you afterwards for um
any extra
so when it works the registration system
is straightforward
didn’t always work i mentioned the
problem with the button not always
showing up
we also had multiple people reported
that they got to the end of the process
and then there was no confirmation it
just came up with a blank screen
it had actually gone through but
perfectly normal reaction if you don’t
get a confirmation
you think this hasn’t worked and you do
it again so then we get people
registering twice and that’s how we
found out
that if you issue a refund through the
excel event site
they deduct the credit card charges from
the customer
which is illegal in europe so we
couldn’t refund people easily we had to
go to excel events and ask them to do it
manually every time and it would take
them days
and it was really annoying they also
never believed us by the way
that that thing of not getting the
confirmation was a problem but we had
maybe a dozen people reported it so i
believe it’s an issue
i couldn’t replicate it but that was
annoying
and it cost us money because then we had
to subsidize the credit card fees so
that was annoying
so things that could have been better um
you can add exhibitor boosts on as an
add-on if you’re charging for them
but it doesn’t automatically set it up
you have to do that yourself
it doesn’t take very long but it does
mean you have to close
registration for new exhibitors some
time before to give you time to actually
do that
limited customization of the
confirmation email yeah the mandatory
excel events branding was a bit annoying
it’s all just very american
and things like the time format is
american and it’s just not what we would
have chosen but not a huge deal
um and very corporate yeah um the front
end
just doesn’t always work um the only
payment methods that accepts the credit
cards even though it’s using stripe it
will only use credit cards
and debit cards um we didn’t think that
would be a problem
because we’re british we had no idea
that there are countries where card use
isn’t widespread
and i’m not even talking about third
world countries germany um
doesn’t really use cards very much we
didn’t know that
um so that was a bit of a problem we
ended up setting up a back channel
where people could pay palace if they
wanted to i’m not
endorsing paypal by the way asked me
afterwards about the time i had to sue
them because they froze a convention
account
the access code discount code thing so i
don’t know if you noticed on the front
of the registration form at the top
there’s a box that says access code
an access code reveals a hidden ticket
type a discount code is a completely
separate thing and is entered on the
final page of the checkout process
and once you’ve had that explained to
you it’s fine it kind of works
but it’s not intuitive and we’ve just
wasted so much time explaining that to
people
and people having problems with it and
it’s just a silly way to set it up
oh there are some really annoying
automated messages you can’t change
like if you dally too much on the
registration form it comes up with this
pop-up saying hurry or tickets might
sell out
our tickets were unlimited they weren’t
gonna sell out but it’s just like
annoying pressure marketing that we
really didn’t want to do
um so the lobby i showed you this
already
oh nice thing about the lobby which i
didn’t show you before is the sidebar is
a live chat
every page within the event has a live
chat i’ve blurred out the names
um but that’s from our event
um at the info desk you can set up faqs
looking at the faqs you can see the kind
of issues we had
um cannot see all the excel event site
yes sometimes some pages just don’t work
sometime today i couldn’t get the login
page to work um i had to use a different
browser no idea why
um how do i donate that’s a nice one um
i’m gonna get on to why we had zoom as
an option
um oh the biggest one so you if you go
into your profile within excel events
um many people wanted to change their
name we’re not a corporate event lots of
people don’t use their real name at fan
events
um and lots of people we had especially
good omens fandom there is a huge trans
contingent so a lot of people whose
legal name
might be one that they’re really really
upset by seeing
um so obviously it’s the first thing you
get presented with when you log in
is your profile and you can change it
and sometimes it just doesn’t work
you change your name and it doesn’t
stick or the weirdest thing which i just
don’t understand from a database coding
kind of point of view
is it will appear to change and then it
will revert back
to the previous one so you’re like type
a chat message think everything’s okay
and then your name will default back to
what it was before
it’s really really strange and then
bloody time zones
um so yeah the profile information one
was actually a bug we reported in may it
was one of the very first ones we
spotted
and the fact that it was still an issue
at our event in october
um despite we put so much pressure on
excel events saying
this is a gdpr issue like it’s really
really serious
they didn’t take it seriously at all um
so good things
forgotten were they good things yes yeah
you can add a custom tab so that’s cool
we used it for the code of conduct
because we wanted that to be kind of
front and center
as people logged in that was nice you
can choose who can post in the main feed
i don’t know why you would
set it so everyone can post because
you’ve got chats for that
we set it so only organizers could post
so that it was like a notice board and
things didn’t get lost um you can
customize the left-hand menu to a point
oh right there was a reason i went on
the tangent about
how many different session types there
are so
if you’re just an attendee showing up
and you’re not familiar with the back
end of this platform
you just see there’s a program item and
you just want to go to it
but that left hand menu is divided up
into the back end session types and you
can’t change that
so we noticed that our very first test
con which fortunately was just a dozen
of our best friends
that they would say oh where’s this next
thing it’s not coming up on the coming
up next thing and you have to say oh
you’ve got to click on lobby
then click on program then find it click
on it it’s just really annoying
um so we we did ask could we just have a
link to the full program in the left
hand menu
and no apparently that’s too hard um
so we liked the lobby had its own chat
that was like the central chat and then
there’s different chats in different
places
and then we have the info desk for faqs
um
bad things yeah i just said that no way
to add full program to the left-hand
menu
the updating the profile i think that’s
a really unacceptable bug i’m still
upset about that
the splitting the left hand menu by
session type is just really opaque
if you don’t understand what it’s doing
um there is no live technical support so
you see a thing that says info desk but
it’s just a
list of faqs there isn’t a place you can
go for tech support
excel events when you do your demo with
them will say we have 24 7 tech support
and they did an onboarding session with
us where they introduced us to our
customer success
manager who was going to be with us all
the way through we never heard from that
person again
um they do have 24 7 tech support
but it’s only accessible via live chat
sometimes you’re waiting
like sometimes you get an answer within
a couple minutes sometimes it’s half an
hour an hour
when you’re running a live event that’s
really not okay
um there was this weird like event admin
who was present like as a person within
a session which seems to be
an excel events owned account it makes
it look like there’s a tech support
person or an admin person you can talk
to but it’s not
a person there’s no one there but that
event admin account which we knew about
because we’d asked about it before
is owned by excel events posted random
spam
in our feed in the lobby of our event
the day before our event
it was just like a link to an um a
youtube video
advertising indian butter or something
very very strange
um so continue the tour program so on
the back end
this is where you set up your sessions
and speakers
on the front end it formats relatively
nicely
so you have the time this automatically
shows your local time which is fine if
you’re not using a vpn
um they only added shortly before our
event the time zone
um it didn’t say what time zone it was
before so we did have some people
getting very confused that the times
didn’t match the times on our website
it’s because it’s in your local time
um during the event going to this
program has a like join session button
now that i took this screencap after the
event it says view recording so you go
to the same page and it has now of the
recording of the panel
um in this screenshot you can also see
at the top of the screen we have a
session where there were two parallel
sessions
you wouldn’t know that unless you happen
to catch the arrow at the side of the
screen
that was a big problem um but to see
when there are there’s more than one
session
at a time you have to know to click the
arrow to see the other sessions
that was a common complaint so good
thing setting up the sessions and
speakers was really easy it
automatically populates the program all
over the site
you can add social media links to
speaker profiles which is good
um and then on the speaker profile it
shows all the sessions they’re speaking
in
you can also link exhibitors to sessions
so if one of your speakers
has a dealer’s table you can link that
from the session they’re speaking
in you can filter the program by tags
you can set up all the tags yourselves
um users can select it to make their
custom schedule
um things that weren’t so great the
speaker account like speaker names are
not lists linked to the user accounts
so if they change their name it doesn’t
change the name of the speaker
um it doesn’t change their profile
picture you have to do all that yourself
which is just
minor annoyance that you’re having to
email all these people say please send
us a profile picture
um you can’t edit the speakers from the
session page you have to like there’s a
bunch of other clicks if you want to
change anything about the speaker when
you’re adding them to the session
that’s a minor annoyance it’s not
completely customizable
so the default social medias that you
can add i think
are twitter and linkedin which is great
for corporate events not so much for fan
events
we wanted things like facebook maybe
tumblr a03
you can’t add custom fields you have to
order the speakers in the session
manually so if you want them to appear
alphabetical or whatever you just have
to do that by hand
and yeah i said it was difficult to see
parallel sessions
um so exhibitor booths um this was we
ended up making really good use of
exhibitor booths we quite liked them
but they were a bit of a nightmare this
is where you set them up
so this is the screen where you set up
all the content of your booth
you can add videos images text links
whatever you want
this screen for some reason was an
absolute nightmare
you start typing and your cursor will
jump back to the beginning of the text
box
or it auto saves periodically and when
it auto saves it deletes the last
paragraph you wrote
another one of these bugs that we
reported that they didn’t believe
it was really really frustrating we got
into the habit of
writing everything in a word document
and then copy pasting it because
it was just such a pain to use we also
ran into
a weird issue um about a week before our
event
a bunch of our booths all the content
just disappeared and we had to write
them all again from scratch
that was really annoying but you can on
the team
tab um up here you can add team members
to the booth
so everyone who’s booked their own booth
you just add them as a team member and
then
they have access to edit it directly so
we don’t have to do that
and then this is what they look like on
the front end this is some of the booths
we had
um at our event and they all show up in
a grid like this and then you click on
them and then you have the full page and
there’s
different tabs and things every booth
has its own chat
um as well as the main chat here for the
exhibitor hall
um there’s a different one for everyone
um you can add tags to booths
so we had there were some people who
were just showing art some people who
were selling merch
we also used it for activities so where
we would normally leave a
board game in the lounge we had some
games that you can play online and we
made it a booth
so people could look through for things
to do in their own time
so good things you can assign unlimited
team members to each booth
so that was really great we had some
people who wanted to share a table for
reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me
um you can have as many people as you
want um the categories were really
useful because
it did get really crowded i forget how
many booths we had
lots so being able to filter them was
really good
and you can make them different sizes so
if you want some to be more prominent
you can make them bigger you do have a
different chat in each booth which is
really great
there’s a zoom integration so this was
quite well used although i didn’t um see
it myself
if you um you can embed a zoom meeting
so it uses the browser version of zoom
which is a bit
but if you’re just a few people chatting
it’s fine um you can also
get the zoom information and then join
it through the desktop app if you want
to
and so people were in their booths doing
like drawing demos
running games that kind of thing our
charity showed up and had like meet and
greet sessions where they talked about
their work that was really cool
and people reported good sales so
anecdotally
we think it worked quite well a thing
that i really enjoyed
was i set up a scavenger hunt set up as
like an escape room kind of thing online
um every time i was getting a bit
annoyed during the event i just went and
looked at the booth chat
for that and it just lifted my spirits
so much because people who had finished
it were helping other people with clues
and that was really cool things that
weren’t so great
you have to create them manually i
already mentioned that when people order
a booth
um you have to link to an external store
most people already had like an etsy or
a redbubble or something and they were
just linking to those
it was really really buggy yeah that was
an absolute nightmare
oh yeah there’s this weird thing with um
if you go into a booth
and click on a link or download a
document
you automatically show up as a lead on
the
back end so the person running the booth
has a paid of
page of leads and it will automatically
show your first and last names and your
email address
there is no warning on the front end
that that’s happening and that your
email address is being shared
so huge gdpr concern um there is a
toggle to switch that off so it doesn’t
happen when we first tried this that
toggle didn’t work
we reported it they never responded to
us but they appear to have fixed it
but it does annoy me that they recommend
having like not
enabling that toggle so that um
that this information is being given to
um
exhibitors without anyone’s knowledge um
i generally got this sense from excel
events that they
were not they didn’t think gdpr was a
thing
that affected them um it’s a common
thing with american companies who don’t
seem to realize that it’s
it’s not just european companies who
have to worry about gdpr it is anyone
who
handles data from european citizens so
if you have
anyone from europe attending your event
gdpr is a thing you need to know about
um they were just not interested they
think luckily that got fixed
before the event um yeah a weird thing
that we didn’t know about that came up
and i think it was really the only
negative thing people said in feedback
forms
was that when you’re on the exhibitor
page people wanted to open booths in
another another tab
and if you right click there wasn’t an
open another tab option
so that’s a mild annoyance the other
back end was just very corporate
so things like having lead generations
and you can rate your leads as hot and
cold
if you’re used to doing corporate things
that make sense if you’re going to a fan
convention people just didn’t understand
what it meant and it was just
a bit weird there’s default text that
goes into your booth
and it has like an offer 50 off
everything this weekend
when you’re setting up your booth it
looks like example text but it’s not
um it is actually there and it shows up
in your booth so you can unknowingly
announce that you’re offering 50 off
everything when you’re not
so that’s annoying um so your profile
as an exhibitor is linked to your email
address which means
that you can only have one name so it
will show
in your booth it says um i can’t
remember what the default text was
because it was really corporate we
changed it to booth hosted by
um and it has your name you might want
to use a different name there than
elsewhere on the site if you have like
if you’re selling under a trade name or
something you can’t do that or you have
to have two email addresses and be
logged in in two different browsers
so mild annoyance um
panels so on the back end this is how
you set up your panels
um lots of choice of streaming providers
you can do youtube vimeo
wistia which is the one i’m not familiar
with um
they’re built-in studio or an rtmp
stream you can set up the description
link exhibitors that sort of thing
on the front end this is what it looks
like you have
the video embedded in the session page
live chat at the side
there’s also if i move your videos out
of the way um
as well as the live chat you have tabs
for in every session there’s polls
um if people want to run polls during
the talk um you can see the people who
are in the session
and there’s a q a tab which was really
useful for keeping
questions aimed at panelists separate
from the chat which was really busy and
active
so the major problem we had here was
let’s do good things first why not
choice of streaming providers was really
great um having
all of these options the rtmp stream
means you can basically do anything
so streaming from zoom was fine that’s
what we wanted to do for special guests
for the captioning
but from the front end which stream
provider you use is invisible
they just go to the session page as
normal the video is embedded they can’t
tell
um but you can see on the session page
if there are linked exhibitors so i had
on this example
the mercury five thing at the top was
the booth
that one of these speakers had
um every panel has its own chat and that
chat stays there for the life of the
event so it’s like 30 days after the
event ends
and the recordings are also available
automatically no work needed
as soon as the session ends um for 30
days afterwards
so the bad thing so this i mean it’s
i’ve put it in as one bullet point but
this was so bad
um we ran a test call and a week before
the event
and found that the built-in studio which
we’d plan to use for everyone who was
not a special guest
because it needed then no input from us
didn’t work
for about a quarter of the speakers
excel events tech support was useless um
they told us that people’s computers
just weren’t up to scratch and we were
like well this person has a gaming
computer so that’s not really an
acceptable answer
some people just saw white squares
instead of other panelist videos
it was just a nightmare um honestly at
the end of that test con i just cried it
was horrible
so we had to make the decision this was
only it’s less than a week before our
event
it went so horribly that we had to
decide we’re just not going to use their
built-in studio
we had to switch everything to zoom and
i mentioned way back at the beginning
that one of the reasons that we were not
going to put everyone on zoom was there
were only two of us
and we had two parallel streams for the
entirety of this event running non-stop
10 am till 10 pm
um and we had to do that by ourselves we
had to every 50 minutes we had to start
a new zoom call get all the panelists
set up start the streaming
stop it start the next one it was
honestly we
like it worked from the front end but it
nearly killed us
um another thing that was annoying is
you can’t
add subtitles to direct uploads or
recordings
this annoys me because on the back end
what they’re using for rtmp streams and
for direct uploads
is mux and mux does allow you to add
closed captions
but excel events hasn’t built that in i
asked so many times
the only way to have closed captions is
to use an external streaming service
i’ve already mentioned why you can’t use
youtube the only one you can use is
vimeo the only way you can use vimeo for
live streaming is to have their
top level premium account which you can
only do on an annual
basis so that instantly adds about a
grand
to your costs so we were not able to do
that
um on the front end um so for the most
part people were positive
about the accelerance experience on the
front end which actually annoyed me
but no it’s good i wanted everyone to
have a really good experience especially
the amount of work we put in
but yeah i hated it when people going on
twitter saying they loved excel events
um the only real complaint we had was
that people did report the video
lagging anytime the live chat got busy
so
um basically anytime neil gaiman said
anything
particularly exciting the live chat was
going oh my god oh my god
and then the video would lag and right
at the end of panels when everyone’s
jumping in to say thank you
um then the video would lag again i
didn’t see that because i was on zoom
um but yeah people reported that being
annoying um at least having the
recording there though
meant no one was particularly upset by
it because they all knew they’d be able
to go and see it again afterwards
um variable delays in the live stream is
a thing i’ve not come across before so
the only real live streaming i’ve done
before is i run a series of astronomy
events which uh we have speakers in zoom
and we live stream to youtube
and we know that there’s a lag there
it’s about 20 seconds we’ve
got used to working with that a thing
i’ve never encountered before
is everyone watching has a different lag
and so this makes it very difficult if
you’re doing anything interactive you
basically can’t do anything interactive
um q a is fine because you’ve got kind
of built-in delay there anyway but
that’s it social spaces oh this was the
other
nightmare so i mentioned the built-in
studio not working
that was nothing compared to the
workshops
i said i was going to mention why
workshops was not an option on that menu
it’s because it just doesn’t work when
we did our testcon
um i kept getting kicked out and again
excel events were telling me i was just
because i don’t have a good enough
computer
i had a week old imac with 10 cores
there’s no way my computer was at fault
if it is
then your product is not a consumer
product
so again we had to make decision a few
days out to completely abandon workshops
in favor of zoom
which worked we know how to do zoom
but meant that it was no longer all
within one portal which was annoying
i’m now going to race because i’m
running out of time i knew i was
covering too much
so we ended up having to set up our
lounge via an exhibitor booth
we did put it at the top people still
struggled to find it we had instructions
here you had to be on the latest version
of zoom to be able to move between
breakout
rooms um and then we had a whole bunch
of different breakout rooms set up
some had scheduled games in them some
you could just grab a group of friends
or
just pop in and chat
so nothing went well um hopefully though
on the front end people didn’t realize
that we didn’t intend to use zoom
all along um so yeah
that was just dreadful um people not be
able to find the lounge
it being separate was not great you
can’t do it as an embedded zoom within
the exhibitor booth because then you
don’t have breakout rooms because it’s
the browser version so that was annoying
and the biggest problem was people not
being on version 5.3
so over and over again have you upgraded
zoom yes are you sure
no that was fun yes thanks so much to
tifo who i believe is here who did an
awful lot of that wrangling for us
um so i wanted to give just a few hints
and tips about doing social things in
zoom because we’ve done it a lot now
um it is actually great for social
spaces especially now that people can
move between breakout rooms
um we had a powerpoint slide shared in
the main room with instructions
how to upgrade zoom how to move between
breakout rooms
but one thing that we’ve been trying to
do with all our events is being aware
that there are different levels of
anxiety
about social spaces some people are
quite happy to just charge into a room
and chat
other people would rather keep their
voice and video off but still want
something interactive to do
um so some of the things that we have
had really good results with
um are here um kahoot is a well-known
one
great for doing quizzes people play
along on their phones they don’t
necessarily have to be talking but
they’re still joining in
jack box is really good we particularly
like quick flash 2 and drawful 2 which
are both part of jack box because you
can set custom prompts so it’s really
good for themed conventions
playing cards to i o is great it’s just
a tabletop simulator so you can set up
whatever game you want
we did a custom version of taboo using
all good omens things
have to admit i have not played among us
but a bunch of people played it during
the convention and it’s really popular
so that was great and then the final one
i have there
is cards against humanity we set up our
own version called cards against
armageddon
uploaded it to a site called pictures
against humanity
you can upload custom card decks and
then just give people the links and how
to find your deck and they can play it
on their own
um all of those resources are on our
website i’ve also got lots of links to
like powerpoint templates for doing tv
game shows and that sort of thing
so think like those kinds of games are
really good for helping the people who
are a bit anxious and don’t necessarily
want to
be on voice and video
sorry just move my videos okay so
overall summary
what we learned the main thing that
surprised me was like an unknown unknown
was that people are way more confused
about time zones than you think they’re
going to be
i guess i was blase about it because
i’ve done a lot of international
collaborations but yeah that was way
more confusing than i thought anyone
would find it
it’s good to have volunteers for a range
of time zones so you’ve got people
covering the overnight your time
um time zones do make scheduling
difficult we had some panels that had
one person in america one in europe and
one in the philippines and there’ll be
like exactly one hour that that panel
can be scheduled
um that was really fun no one reads
instructions this is true for physical
events as well but at least at a
physical event you could like stand in
front of them
for this no no one reads instructions
have you upgraded zoom
really it was like the big box at the
top of our final if you read nothing
else read this email before the event
still no one did it
that’s not true lots of people did
schedule breaks so we didn’t
because we wanted to pack in as much as
we could during the hours we were awake
on the basis that no one had to watch
anything live
they could come back like watch the
things that they’d missed later
people don’t want to do that there’s
this fomo i have to watch everything
live or i might miss something
um and so then people over excerpt
themselves and they really need a break
so just schedule the breaks anyway
if we had known we’d be running
everything through zoom of course we
would have scheduled breaks for our own
sanity we didn’t
pre-record your opening ceremony so we
did this out of necessity because we
wanted it to be subtitled and we didn’t
want to pay 200 pounds to subtitle it
so we pre-recorded it the day before
subtitled it ourselves
it was great though because it meant
during that first hour of the convention
we were there able to provide tech
support help people who were struggling
to log in
all that kind of thing so that was
really good you do need live tech
support it was the two of us
it was really hard and tfo thank you so
much
it was yeah you need people who are just
there answering that i can’t log in
i can’t find the zoom that kind of thing
it’s yeah too many people
so in summary we are really pro virtual
comms
um it opened it up to so many people who
would never otherwise have been able to
attend
we also frankly cannot afford neil
gaiman at a physical event
and he never would have agreed to come
if it had to travel somewhere
so it is great it is does present issues
time zones payment methods language
barriers that’s another reason
to have subtitles besides the
accessibility issue it just needs a bit
of thought in advance
and it is possible to create the feeling
of a physical convention with
interactivity
if you work at it we do though this is
my call to action to like the industry
please give us a better option for
subtitling um
this is the main thing that i think
people are struggling with now
so i’m just going to leave you with an
image of our setup this is how we ran
our convention
from our dining room table so that we
could hardwire into our router
with a big computer two laptops that’s
how we ran a convention for 661 people
from milton keynes so thank you very
much i’m really sorry for going long
that was really long
that was great thank you so much
and okay uh
steve are you ready we’ll turn it over
to you
okay um uh i’m ready if people can hear
me just give me uh
okay uh steve davidson i’m the publisher
of amazing stories
uh i’m uh talking to you today without
any keith
for various reasons but i’m more
intelligible than richard
so uh we’ll just have to deal
um rachel i was
extremely impressed uh with everything
that you had to say
and presented uh i’ve been taking notes
uh and uh really the big
thought in my head is gee i really like
to
bring you on board to run amazing con 2.
[Laughter]
so uh along those lines at some point i
would like to talk to you about your
experiences and the technologies and
what not that you use
uh for your event if uh if that would be
okay
yeah absolutely get in touch wonderful
um my presentation is also not nearly as
sophisticated
as rachel’s is uh i don’t have the
accent
so i apologize in advance if this is a
little bit of a letdown after
what a great presentation that we just
saw
uh i’m here today to talk about the uh
ad hoc emergency uh
methodology i used to schedule what
turned out to be
a fairly complicated uh three-day
multi-track convention
uh in approximately five weeks
uh and um i don’t know uh
what anybody’s experience with
scheduling uh
a convention is um but
if you notice uh if you’ve ever been
invited to
be on a panel um
that work probably begins in general
about a year
uh before the actual convention maybe
nine months before the convention uh
when everybody who did it the previous
year has had a chance to recover and
then start the engines up all over again
um i’m having a little trouble
with the echo here on my headphones so
um so the genesis of amazing con
is this uh
the pandemic began the lockdown started
uh some people were talking about
getting online and doing various things
by a
variety of different uh services
and uh i suddenly said to my people one
day
uh why don’t we put together a series of
readings
lord knows we have enough authors uh
and uh they’re always looking for an
opportunity to get themselves out there
and uh why don’t we just schedule like a
few back-to-back
uh readings and see how it goes uh
and everybody was keen on that so i got
in touch with all the authors both those
who
contribute to the website and who have
appeared in the
magazine and uh i got back a couple
years sounds good
and 24 hours later i had close to 70
people wanting to do meetings
uh at that point i said you know we
really need to
think about this a little bit more uh
and within
a handful of days it became apparent
that we needed to put together uh an
entire
multi-day convention um
we had originally been scheduled for may
we pushed it off by about five weeks
to uh june uh time frame
and then the work began and i had done
uh scheduling uh for
a few conventions uh i was the first uh
scheduler uh program head for the
heinlein centennial convention a task i
had to give up
um and i have a lot of years of
experience scheduling
paintball tournaments which in if you
can believe it are in a lot of respects
more complicated than convention uh
event scheduling um
i just lost myself here what’s going on
there we go um
so i had to figure out a quick way
because i did not have time to learn
scheduling software or to use uh
tools that i was unfamiliar with i had
to figure out a quick way
to determine uh how to put the schedule
together for the event
and what i ended up doing was using a
spreadsheet and color coding
and some very very specific questions
to the people who are going to
participate in the programming
um to give you an example i’m going to
show you a screen now
of uh the um
[Music]
i thought i was going to uh the um
scheduling of formats um can you all see
this
spreadsheet with red yellow and clean
bars
okay um you’ve heard of my notes because
i’m
kind of drifting a little bit here um
so back up uh i had a very short time
frame to do this
and i had far more people involved than
i had originally uh intended
and i for me visualization was the key
to being able to schedule everybody
in not have any overlaps give people
time between their
panels their readings and put together a
schedule that kind of flowed and had
some interest
for everybody
so what i did was the first question
was who wants to do a reading
and most importantly
tell me what your preferences are for
days of the convention be it
first preference second preference third
preference
and then any particular times that you
won’t be available
and the way that translated on the
screen
was first preference was green
color-coded second preference
uh yellow and third preference red with
blank spaces
showing when a particular individual was
not available
and it was simply a question of plugging
in uh
as you can see in the illustration here
x’s
for particular panelists at a particular
time on a particular day
uh the next thing that we went to was
well let’s
add some panels
okay so the next question that went out
to everybody
was and this is unusual usually
conventions set themselves up
with a group of conrunners figuring out
what kind of subjects they’d like to
have on their panels
uh sometimes it involves uh soliciting
external people but at some point uh it
goes
out to a list of guests
usually uh we like you to hear on this
panel this panel on this panel
uh and they ask you for conflicts or
whatever
uh i kind of inverted that again as a
time-saving measure
give me one or two panel subjects that
you would like to participate on
to all the potential participants
uh i got that information back in
uh within 48 hours
and plotted it the same way that i had
plotted
the readings by
marrying up the um
restrictions and preferences uh
and uh time frames
um what was nice about
using this quick methodology was that
with all the x’s populating the screen
you could look across a row to see
where somebody was scheduled and you
could look down a column
for a particular time frame and
almost instantly uh potential conflict
uh was revealed by showing too many x’s
in a particular time squad
um i did not fortunately i really lucked
out
but i learned i was reminded i should
say of the one trick
that’s essential to doing scheduling for
these kinds of things with any
type of tools and that is
scheduling the most restricted people
first the the ones that have the most
conflicts
the smallest windows of availability
those are the people who you plug into
the schedule first
and then you work uh everything else
around it
um i was discussing this interestingly
enough with my mother the other day
and she was an educator and she said oh
yes
that’s exactly like english as a second
language
students whenever we did the annual
class schedule uh the first people that
we scheduled were the ones for english
as a second language
because that had such a restricted
availability
so it’s a similar kind of thing i’m sure
that
it’s a it’s a little little trick that
once you remember it it makes
complete uh sense
um in terms of uh
i’m trying to figure out how to show you
guys a different screen here so if you
give me a second
um i’ll try and
pull that up uh
now i’m not seeing
okay i can’t do that i i set up uh
tabs in my browser for for different
pictures
uh jay and uh but if i switch over
i don’t have the option to display
different
uh different cab
any suggestions
if you share and then you choose the
first
option which is your desktop then you
can go between tabs
so unshare it and then reshare using the
desktop option
okay um right now i’m totally lost
new share
no i want to unshare so i don’t want to
share i want to turn that off
how am i doing that yes or you could
stop me
okay so now i change the change to the
tab i want and then change
and then share again that’s one way of
doing it
or the first the first box that comes up
is your desktop box
and that’ll allow you to you know when i
when i go to share
uh i get um maybe that’s it let me see
yeah there we go okay um
this is the schedule at a glance just to
give you some idea
of what the eventual final product
uh was we had two separate rooms for
readings
we needed it uh owing to uh time
restrictions and availability
uh we had two panel rooms uh
we had one room for ongoing workshop
multi-hour
i think it was six hour each
presentations and then
some externally linked to um
events uh which ended up basically being
seven tracks of programming
[Music]
um
as i said i’m not nearly as prepared as
rachel was
um and that’s that’s pretty much it uh
on on this little tool that i created
um just uh using the visualization
and the colors uh to put things together
in a very
uh short time frame
um so i figured that uh
questions would be uh more in order than
simply just presenting
uh that kind of a thing um the event
uh was advertised for about two months
we ended up with a bit over 200
participants
uh which i consider to be pretty decent
for our first time out
um we ran into technical issues
uh as like were previously described
uh and our backend people were driven
crazy
especially considering the fact that i
was not able to actually get into my own
event
um so uh we had basically two people
pretty much running all seven rooms um
which was a nightmare for them but it
was doable
and at the end of the conclusion most of
the attendees said that
they had not noticed that there were any
real issues we had some few delays
uh we did not have closed captioning
which is definitely something that we’re
looking into for our next event
uh i’ve done some looking into um
having a sign language folks appear um
to do uh instantaneous uh
that looks like it’s probably gonna be
cost prohibitive
um and uh
the other issue that we’re dealing with
uh for amazing con 2 is that it’s going
to be
multi-language we’re going to have
several spanish language
tracks maybe a chinese language track in
addition to
english and others are banging on the
door
so that’s that’s pretty much uh sorry
that it’s not nearly as sophisticated as
what you all were presented before but
it’s just
a simple little spreadsheet tool with
color coding
to help visualize what’s going on with
your uh
convention programming and i would be
happy to answer any questions that
people might have
um hello this is uh peter
shivka so you mentioned that the the
next amazing con
uh you know will will be bigger with
with extra tracks for other languages
um are you thinking and and it sounds
like there’s a lot more time to plan it
are you
thinking that you’ll probably use a more
formal the scheduling tool rather than
just a spreadsheet
um i’m hoping to pass the entirety of
scheduling off to somebody else
[Laughter]
and i’m actively looking for volunteers
this is a
traditional style convention
we’re looking for fans who
um do and have done live conventions
uh to come on board and participate in
helping to run the convention as is
customary
so i have feelers out i have other
people i’ve been talking to
right now i have i think it’s five
different people
developing separate tracks of
programming which is how i chose to
approach things the second time around
so i have
one group of people who are working on
fan and fan history based programming uh
i have my spanish language editor who is
working with a couple
of authors on the spanish language
programming
um i have an author
um an indie
author who is working on um
indie authoring related uh programming
tracks
um and then i’ve got a couple of folks
with the magazine who were uh
working on the readings and uh kathy
and we will be using more formal
scheduling tools in order to short
everything
steve what was your attendance like we
had i think
all told it was uh 217 or something like
that
and the most online at any one given
time was 201.
and were you charging no uh
and thank you for reminding me um our
model
was um based on a couple of things
which were included the fact that
um we did not want to annoy people
during the pandemic who were looking for
things to do
by asking for a membership fee
what we did do was offer free membership
we for security purposes we had to have
everybody who was going to attend
register so that we had an email address
for them
uh etc uh and that we could pass the
uh passwords and access codes to get
into the event too
in a controlled station um
but what we did do was set it up so that
it was free
uh and if you wanted to donate something
to the convention you were free to do so
um and on average
uh we ended up taking in per person
uh like a 35 uh entry fee not every
most people didn’t but the folks who did
support it
paid well more than 25 or 50
uh to do so and i think
uh with rare exception
given the budget that i’m looking at
right now
uh we’re probably going we’re pretty
confident
that we will cover our expense budget
for the second convention if we maintain
that free
with a donation type of a type of
structure
so steve are you enabling your website
to be multilingual
um the website which website for the
convention
or for or the existing amazing stories
website
um mainly convention but both
um i’m not sure exactly how that’s going
to be handled
uh i’m taking uh suggestions and
information in from people so i don’t
know
um exactly how we’re going to handle
that at this point in time
um i want to try to do it though and for
me
um wanting to try to do it is an
exercise in
jumping in and figuring out how we’re
going to do it
rather than
[Music]
targeting a specific methodology
i’m in the same situation with this site
i know there’s a wordpress plugin i
should be using
and that’s something to do in the near
future
yeah i mean the all the uh
the many bells and whistles we were
entirely on zoom
uh with with video capture of the
sessions
which i have been painfully converting
to put up on
uh youtube um a lot of this stuff
that has become available or is
known to be available uh is uh
relatively new
um and uh
more power to folks like rachel who are
going and doing the research
uh uh of um
what is out there and and diving into
who can handle what
uh for various services but um
the intention is to
to stream on facebook or youtube or
as many different platforms as we’re
able to
uh get it out there uh through
in future
steve thank you very much for
raising the spreadsheet based
system as as an option jay i’m going to
suggest
that scheduling is probably a topic that
you could devote an entire day
to because there are so many nuances
ranging from simplicity to
complexity so what steve did works
well for a small fan based convention
but it’s inherently not scalable
even if you use um collaborative tools
like like google docs
so that multiple people can be working
on on program at the same time
it’s inherently not scalable and as soon
as you get something the size of
worldcon
then you are into the domain of
something
quite a bit bigger something much more
complex but also something that
has a commercial base and um
for welcome we used grenadine um
henry has turned his camera off because
he has a scheduling conflict where i
think he’s attending two
conventions right you now
to me privately that there was another
one on punctuation so
grenadine was what i had specifically in
mind and
the learning curve for me was just going
to be too long for the time frame that i
had
available yeah well then there’s another
system so
in in order to give him an opportunity
to mention it um peter oh
has been working on a a system that is
you know sort of a lower a lower tier
and open sourced
um and therefore more inherently
available on the fan base
but potentially less sophisticated than
grenadine is which has a large engine
behind it
working to create it and is is
infinitely scalable
so there’s this whole question of of
what tools you use
um i i think is worthy of further
exploration
great this is the sort of thing i don’t
know i don’t know
and so
if you could put whatever you know about
scheduling systems into the discussion
group
uh we’ve got a topic for discussions
uh so one thing i want to mention about
that
is that the um the software that you’re
currently using for this
discussion group wouldn’t let me paste a
url
i wanted to paste the url to my my
software did you
do it in discussion or in the feed
before things started yeah um
okay let’s good time i’ll share my
screen
and we’ll one second
okay you could use the uh customer
support method of the the previous
uh the excel events and just say it’s
not a problem it’s a feature
jay is i think the antithesis of excel
events here okay
so now
groups my groups
yeah i mean this is new to me too
schedule systems yeah so this is the
feed but we want a discussion
and test
and well
though are you logged in as an
administrator or a regular user
administrator but a regular user should
be able to do it too okay um
okay yeah there it is okay and i could
just log out
discussions and do as a regular user
um
uh i’ll just do here
discussions
yeah there we go um yeah it’s a bit
confusing
and something i need to learn to do
because of the feed of this group
being able to post something directly
i want to turn that off
okay i’m not i’m not an admin and i was
able to just send a link to the youtube
session to peter just
it seems like it’s working
i’m i’m going to grab another piece of
scheduling
that we schedule
participants for the panels but
scheduling all of your resources is
another big hairball
and if you’ve got um
uh you know it’s harder than real time
thing but if you have specific
assistance that need to work with some
participants or if you
don’t have so many zoom sessions or
whatever if you’re doing some things
versus webinars versus meetings
um figuring all of that in there
uh you know you know staff to cover
things
um it you know
it’s okay if you’ve only got two or
three people uh but then you burn out
those two or three people
um and it’s
not as much of a problem necessarily as
getting your participants on the right
panels
but getting your support staff in there
uh will bite you
scheduling of prerequisites and
co-requisites and making sure that there
are hard linkages and soft linkages
what we did for worldcon where we were
completely shooting in the dark
and we knew we had all these
requirements but we didn’t know
we i mean there was there was no history
for us to
um go on so we’re very much feeling as
we as we went
is we set up multiple layers
so programming was all being scheduled
in grenadine that was fairly well
understood and grenadine came out of
a need to develop a large-scale
multi-track scheduling system for
worldcon so that was that was
right on topic we knew we were going to
have a problem with international
scheduling of resources people and
particularly
across time zones the time zone thing
again we did a lot of research and then
used
a tool called when i work which
whilst not perfect actually would have
done a really good job
had it not been for two major things one
of which was
people’s refusal to buy into the system
unless you’ve got a scheduling system
for whatever resources or tracks or
whatever if
everybody doesn’t buy into it it falls
apart really quickly
the other part was simply people not
having enough time
to get to understand how the tool worked
and there’s always learning curve
involved in in any of these things so
we had a number of scheduling approaches
like that depending on what the the
tasking was and some of it was driven by
spreadsheets
a lot of it was driven by by tools that
were relatively robust and
absolutely scalable that’s that’s got to
be the target the um
the inspiration to go back to that came
actually from the first world con that i
worked on
which was suncon in 77. so as you can
imagine
no computers involved whatsoever the
closest we came to electronics was an
ibm’s electric
typewriter and everything was laid out
uh essentially on a uh a white board
with a grid
and markers that were moved around to
accommodate various uh
considerations so
it also didn’t help that when we got to
the hotel we had to move rooms because
some of them were unusable but that’s a
different part of the scheduling issue
what do you do when uh the schedule link
doesn’t apply to the physical plant
well but but in fact um
that can be where some of the
tools that are that are more advanced in
a spreadsheet can
uh can help you oh sure because um
the uh uh as an example
uh zambia which is the scheduling
software that
that i’m the architect for um is
uh has an integration with canopus and
conopus is another open source tool
that’s used for publishing the schedule
and so with those two
um it’s possible to take an item on the
schedule
and change what room it’s in and that
will be on everybody’s phone
in five minutes
and and and so the and the the same
would be true
for for grenadine and probably almost
you know
you know many of the tools out there
that would would
would give you that ability um
steve mentioned a good one and has come
up come up with
uh rachel’s discussion also of learning
curves
that a lot of these things are complex
and we are
you know we are used to sitting down and
just doing something
with you know if you if you use word a
lot you just sit down and you do things
um but that’s because you’ve already
learned how to use it
and you know and you you’ve kind of
getting the idea of how it works
with anything like say i’ve i’ve used
zambia a little bit i’ve used grenadine
a bit
of poke did a lot of things but unless
you
have the time to learn how to use them
you’re going to get frustrated and
sometimes
you know sometimes falling back to the
spreadsheet is the answer because
it’ll do what you need when you need it
right now and
you can move on from that but i’m not
i’m sorry well go ahead i’m not
advocating this
as a solution to uh convention
scheduling uh
around the world this is just an example
of what was used
in a very short specific
circumstance situation uh
a tiny little tool that i came up with
based on past prior experience with a
variety of different things
that worked uh for me in this particular
circumstance
and it may be that
[Music]
it could be used in similar
circumstances
uh it’s just
added to the knowledge set of ways that
you can go about
accomplishing these kinds of things
exactly and it’s kind of where i was
partly where i was going that if it
works for you that’s great
and if it works for me that’s great but
when you start to move into the more
complex things
you need the more complex tool and now
you need to learn how to use the more
complex tool because
a word processor is not a typewriter if
you’re doing one letter to somebody
typewriter might be fine if you’re doing
thousands of customized ones
it is no longer fine but you’ll have to
learn how to use the word processor
i i think it’s sorry to interrupt you uh
c bang
um i just think it’s just a matter what
tools people are familiar with and what
they get most productivity out
of and it also it also depends on the
size and the complexity of the
convention if your convention’s small
enough and you get a lot of productivity
i would use the spreadsheets then find
go with it
it’s uh it’s just a matter of what what
you can work with to get
to get your get the job done for you
in the least effort for what you need
going with that theme it really doesn’t
matter so long as the attendees are
happy with the event
and didn’t see any of the uh behind the
curtain stuff
uh yes steve but uh the other issue is
you don’t want to burn out the people
working on the event as well
if they have to run around like crazy
the back end even if the attendees don’t
see that then the next time you’re doing
it you
you couldn’t you’re not gonna right no
absolutely
uh and i took this on so that
my people who are working on the
magazine and on the
books and whatnot that we had coming out
did not have to add
that kind of thing to their schedules
so no absolutely uh
i’ve worked on a ton of conventions
uh been on my feet for two and a half
days straight
uh helping to keep conventions running
events running
and uh it’s not something that you do
lightly if you have any experience with
it it’s not something that you do
lightly to the people who are
volunteering to work on a convention
steve what you’re describing there is
another scheduling aspect that is
inherently unscalable
which is as you grow the size of the
convention the number of people involved
gets bigger and then there comes a point
at which
it can go from relatively flat and
tossing things across the transom
to somebody you know will pick it up to
a hierarchical structure where you
actually have divisions and managers and
subgroups
and you can’t trust that any of that
will happen
and one one of the assumptions that we
made very early about worldcon because
of the size
was that a massive amount of activity is
going to be driven by
education and training on systems and
one of my early architectural proposals
was
that we actually centralized training
with a group again
that worked to a greater or lesser
extent we did actually have somebody
who’s responsible for training what we
didn’t want was everybody to be going
off
and trying to run their own training
on sub systems we wanted to coordinate
that to get as much efficiency as we
could
again it worked to to a greater or
lesser extent
um a lot of people were going mine mine
mine
and were desperate to keep control of of
something whether that was
the good right thing to do for for the
convention or not
and that disabled a lot of the
efficiencies
so um you know i i’d be looking there’s
a point at which
things become inherently unscalable
and that’s the point at which you need
to be scared and and
this is this is exactly what rachel
mentioned any number of times in her
presentation there were two people
and that was inherently unscalable with
the time frame they had
right and they would not want to do it
that way again
i do actually have a question though
because um you’re talking about
learning curves so um a thing that i
didn’t have time to get onto
is what would we do next time because i
do think
that conventions needs to go hybrid
um if you even when we’re not staying
virtual and i’m totally on board with
that
obviously i’m not going back to excel
event so what am i doing
so i’m currently working on my own
system
anyone who has ever looked at the
ineffablecon website will know that i
write all my websites
by hand in php and css and that’s
clearly not going to work if i’m trying
to build an excel events replica that
actually works
so what i’ve been doing the last few
weeks is learning wordpress
and the big stumbling block i’ve come
across there are lots of events plugins
lots of which have incorporated virtual
things none of them seem to be able to
handle
parallel program streams which every fan
convention has
um so i don’t know i’m very new to this
i’ve never used wordpress before is this
a thing anyone else knows about
uh not that specific question but
i will tell you that i have the
resources to maybe get you a really good
answer
there are so the conference
yeah the conference program i’m using
does
power rule streams
which one are you using jay um
it’s slowly conference plugin um
in the i’ve done an overview on sep
um you run into some of the word
standard wordpress problems that a lot
of plugins were
written once and not maintained or they
were
written for a specific purpose which is
not quite yours
and can’t readily be modified to do it
um or just
i mean we we ran into this with with
conceal and setting up stuff for that i
was i was not involved with the
wordpress side
i just listened that you’d find things
that worked
up to 100 users and then ran out of
steam
just because of the way they were
designed um
yeah i was going to say if you toast
like a grenadine of course which i’ve
been involved with and i don’t know if
you can talk to zambia
where you do the scheduling you can also
embed the schedule in another site
so you can bet you can bet schedule in a
wordpress site which is what uh
some cons have done in the past as well
yeah would readily embed
um and um but yeah canopus is just a
tool for
uh for displaying the schedule of a
convention
i i presume ratio you you want to talk
not just
display the schedule but to take you to
like this uh session detail page as
embedded yeah
so i need a separate um
page or like a custom post type or
whatever learning wordpress lingo
for every session so that you can embed
a different video in every session
and what i found from a lot of the um
events plugins that exist
is they think an event is just one thing
and you can embed
one zoom meeting or one youtube video
i’m like no i’ve got hundreds
and i’m finding one where you can create
a custom session page
and have it display nicely i haven’t
found a single plugin that will do that
and i don’t yeah i’m still researching i
just play in the chat
the problem i’m using yeah
it does make pages but the pages are
sort of buggy
um and i’ve invited the guy to
come and talk uh he hasn’t responded yet
and buddypress also has
other features which maybe in their
theme would
work better uh definitely embedded zoom
i was looking earlier at event on i
think
which um is nice because it has
the like embedding the video thing but
it does think that a video is a whole
event
so i was wondering if you can do some
fiddling with that by setting an event
type
and having essentially every session
within your conference be an event
and i don’t haven’t quite figured out
how you display that
um yeah i don’t really know how this
works
i’ll go ahead i just want to say the
part of it’s also terminology
when you talk to some professional event
planners or conference planners they
talk
they talk about at conference they have
multiple events
and some people say conference is an
event in that event they have multiple
sessions
so it’s it’s sometimes when people say
to
say event they’re thinking about the
whole thing and sometimes they take
interest about session with them
with them the overall conference and
i don’t know the plugins in wordpress
but maybe some of them are talking
different terminology there which may be
the
issue as well there’s also a bit of a
just a technology thing that if you’re
trying to
embed a you know rtmp stream display
versus embedding a zoom meeting um
or some you know some other technology
uh
by the way i currently recommend against
webrtc
for anything because it seems to be
way still way heavy on resources
compared to the other things
uh rachel you might reach out to uh the
folks that did
no rescon a couple months ago
because they set up okay it was it was a
little hacky but
um four set four simultaneous streams
displaying on web pages
um they did something to block just
lifting the urls out
and and um running them yourself
and what is sorry another technology
thing
that they did zoom meetings that were
then
bopped into streams and then used
discord separately as the chat session
and that you had them side by side on
the screen
so there might be something you can
steal out of that
thanks i will look into that yeah i was
thinking for the video streaming
just using vimeo because i
they’ve got that figured out and i’m not
about to try and set up a media
streaming service
i did look into mux which excel events
use on the back end
very reasonably priced and it’s all
accessed through api
so it’s quite easy to set up your
rtmp urls and everything and then it
automatically converts to a recording
so might look into using that but i’m
just thinking vimeo because it’s
the streaming services are almost
interchangeable at this point
i mean you know muck or you know i i
refer to them as you twitch
sometimes that uh vimeo uh there’s one
called you
screen which is uh another thing
although i think it front ends vimeo
but that that almost just becomes the
mechanics
um that becomes syntax instead of
semantics
they uh not western con but uh
one of the recent conventions worked
with uh maybe it was
the worldcon worked with uh the fantasy
network and rehearsal tv
uh to do uh streaming that was that was
that was continuing um
unfortunately i didn’t get to really see
too much of that
uh from what i’ve seen and heard it
appear to work fairly well
uh we’re working with those folks on a
variety of different things uh
and they are actually uh earlier i
forgot to mention
they’re one of the other track people
who are handling uh media
stuff for uh amazing content so
they might be a resource to look into as
well and if somebody wants to get in
touch with them i’ll be happy to
provide the information
so an interesting issue we ran into with
the
3d con um
we had a presenter who is going to show
old stereoscopic pictures which had
nudity
which youtube would have cut her off the
stream
so actually how to change what the
presenter was going to show
right totally different talk
well we’ve watched the video feed uh
from one of the hugo presentations
because of uh
ai and uh intellectual property uh
concerns a couple of years ago
so yeah and actually i just heard an
interesting piece there
um i’ve you know ip and recording things
that this is another one of those little
check boxes for tracking stuff
is um will the presenters allow
their stuff to be recorded will they
allow you know
what what is their audience expectation
that
um for most you know most small
conventions this is
never a problem you know in person it’s
seldom a problem
but you know there were a few of them
with with world cons and some other ones
where the presenter said
do not record my session uh or
or do not stream it outside of this
closed environment
and you end up having to ask the
question and track it
we uh we got releases from everybody
um doing presentations
uh our problem was that uh folks not
being all that
uh familiar with zoom
uh non-presenters
frequently appeared on the main screen
uh from whom we did not have uh releases
so uh i had to either edit those
uh portions out of the videos that have
now
gone up and archived uh
or get in touch and seek a release
from the attendees as well as the
presenters
so yeah it is a potential issue
the one that was mentioned uh and i’m
i’m kind of making up an example because
it’s easier
is that people from disney are generally
not allowed to to present anything to
anyone
um and i went to a presentation last
year
by somebody at disney who had permission
to
give the presentation and show their
show their pictures
but not to have the presentation
recorded and in fact
twice he had to say to people out in the
audience that had cameras up nope put it
away
no recording nothing can stop
somebody from recording it at home
because it’s you know electronic but
um you know if you get the appearance of
saying don’t do it
yeah yeah we did have an advantage over
conceal and
in that we were always virtual so
obviously
anyone signing up to be on a panel there
was a default you agree that your
session will be recorded and available
on demand for 30 days after the event
that’s a completely separate thing to
being available outside
of that community so then separately we
had a
if you are cool with being out there
publicly great let us know when we’ll
put your video on youtube so other
people can see it
and a decent number of people did that
but not everyone and we had minors in
some videos so we didn’t even want to go
there
um but i had a point
that i’ve forgotten so you carry on
uh i was gonna say that we we had a
range of that at the
at the 3d convention uh where our
keynote um wanted to be uh
he he didn’t want to be recorded um
because he had
uh he had slides that were going to be
in a book so he didn’t want to
compromise that
and uh uh so so we had to
uh we had to definitely message that to
people
so that they could uh show up live and
not rely on the recorded streams
um we also had a 3d theater portion of
it
which was running on on youtube in both
the anaglyph and the side-by-side format
for 3d tvs
and all of the submissions for the
different
short films for that was a whole other
range of
of uh legalities as far as what like for
festivals
where you have festival rights to do
whatever and with
with music also which is going to be on
youtube
uh sometimes your video can get flagged
and you might end up
it might end up knocking off the whole
stream like the whole block of
of movies rather than just that movie um
so we
we dealt with that as well when we also
had a uh
like an academic symposium of people
talking about uh historical
uh stereoscopic uh uh topics
and there were 10 different speakers
including the one guy who was the
keynote who also didn’t want to be
recorded for that
but also i think when i think if you if
you publish
if you speak on youtube then maybe in
some circles it’s considered publishing
your paper somehow so there’s another
kind of
luckily everyone else gave their uh
their permission to put them there but
that was another
wrinkle that we hadn’t thought of before
the convention
i remembered what my point was um the
one worry we had obviously you can set
up a system where people can’t share the
direct link and people can’t download
the video
but there is no physical way to stop
people screen recording
so we just had it very front and center
in our code of conduct
that is a breach of code of conduct to
screen record people still did it
people have said to my face that they’ve
done it which really pisses me off
um but yeah you just have to have it as
a code of conduct thing i think that’s
the most people can do
so we’ve had some requests to take a
break
but it looks like the next speaker isn’t
here yet
so the next half hour might be a break
i’ll go see if he shows up
well thanks for attending
um thanks steve
i’m gonna model my next presentation on
rachel’s
i i should have said bethany made the
slides
i just i didn’t do it i was giving a
talk at a whole other convention
yesterday so i just didn’t have time
well that’s that’s very good delegating
that’s that’s that’s inherently scalable
[Laughter]
i i think two two two t-shirt designs
are gonna come out of this
one is rachel’s uh that’s annoying
and uh you’re uh it’s scalable
it’s inherently scalable
actually take taking that as an
interesting segue just as a
something that i was thinking about
earlier that um
for scheduling and virtual stuff um
there’s a there’s a wonderful phrase
but probably at least half of you know
it called
shooting ratio and
it’s the the amount of time you spend or
the amount of video
film video you shoot to get an hour of
presentation
and a lot of people you know with the
with the real time thing
you spend an hour doing it you maybe
spend you spend some time prepping i
hope
you spend an hour do whatever doing it
and you’re done
and convincing people that oh you want
to do
the opening ceremony is pre-recorded and
it’s a half hour
fine plan on spending 10 or 15 hours
doing it
oh but it’s only a half hour and it’s
going to take you 10 or 15 hours to get
it looking the way you want it just
live with that it’s going to happen and
sometimes knocking that into people’s
heads that
you know the fact that you’re not
physical doesn’t make it any easier and
makes it harder in some ways
you plan for it
yeah so i was a huge proponent

family feud in america it’s trying to
lose
that you’re trying to get the least the
most obscure correct answer
um but it’s a little bit awkward on the
back end because you have to look up the
answer someone’s given
type in the number and then you have a
little thing that comes down and it’s
all cool but it’s a bit awkward
so we thought let’s pre-record it it
will look so much slicker
it did but i spent about 35 to 40 hours
editing and that was not worth it
we should have just had it looking a bit
awkward and done it live off the
the zoom sessions that i’m that i’m
putting up on youtube
on our channel i have to watch
an hour long session and it takes an
hour to watch it
just to know what i’m going to have to
go in to edit
so you’re you’re adding the entire
length of the convention which
in this amazing cons cases like 28 hours
in total of the recorded stuff
and uh that is
a minimum amount of time that has to be
put in before any work is even done on
videos so yeah it it it’s time consuming
the um the one thing rachel that you
spoke about
and touched on earlier that i’m
particularly really keen
on is um hybrid
uh convention uh i i’m looking
uh i mean you mentioned wide
international attendance at your uh
ineffable con
um i had the same thing even out of 200
and some odd people i had people from
japan i had people from australia i had
people from
uh czechoslovakia um etc etc
uh attending and um
the amount
that the hybrid convention the potential
that it has
to open up attendance to a worldwide
audience for even the smallest most
focused event is just
absolutely tremendous
and i think especially for the small
focused events because i
if the theme of your thing is you’re a
science fiction convention
and you’re based in birmingham well
people in sydney australia are going to
go to their local one
if your theme is a lot more specific
people elsewhere don’t have
a local equivalent so it is nice to
include international audiences
and it’s a thing that people have been
asking for for years
um when we’ve been doing these niche
things we get people on the other side
of the world saying will any of the
panels be recorded
and we have to say no because none of
the panelists are comfortable being on
camera
but now that they have to be on camera
maybe people are getting over that
and it will be easier to go hybrid um i
don’t know i hope so
and hybrid adds a whole another set of
hairballs
to uh two well yeah it’s every
difficulty of running a physical
convention plus every difficulty of
doing a virtual convention
and doing them both at the same time
yeah not very scalable
it’s not annoying
it’s it’s not not as much an n you know
an n square root 2 problem
as a n squared problem
i i was wondering i i i don’t know what
the cost of it is but zoom has a thing
called sum rooms which is not the same
as some breakout rooms
in some rooms it’s basically like having
a conference where you have people
participate
physically and virtually whether that
could be repurposed for a hybrid
convention where you’d have people
participate virtually and physically as
well
and whether or not it would be cost
effective to do that kind of thing
well then you run into a hardware issue
in order to do that
hybrid you have to have you know decent
cam cameras sound feed is it coming
through a microphone um i just uh
attended online a in-person
memorial for a friend
had lost a family member and it was
wonderful to see
and kind of be there in this virtual
space
but the microphone was cutting in and
out
so all the speakers i’d catch every
fourth word
i’m just realizing how stressful that
becomes when you’re trying to hear
and then in that real time and there was
no
tech support i couldn’t text someone to
say hey that microphone’s not picking
them up
um our synagogue we’ve just started
doing these hybrid events
for family bar mitzvahs
so a family with maybe one or two
pods of membership that we can only have
like 20 people
in that physical space because of covid
but we’re also doing it on zoom so
family members everywhere else can zoom
in
and we’ve had to bring in a tech person
that can run
two cameras and feeding into obs
and then our internet isn’t
in that room so we i bought you know
four 50-foot cables to try to get
internet to the laptops and it so it
lends like this whole other layer
of technical aspect on top of the
scheduling and the people and the
coordinating
that went into the live event and the
zoom event
rachel you’ve just mentioned something
that’s yeah look
you’ve just covered something that is
sort of unfolding
um you know along with my colleagues
like peter and zibang
who are on here right now we’ve got a
lot of experience
knowing how to do tech for conventions
and we have a relatively well-oiled
machine
i can tell you that for con zealand that
almost completely fell apart
and we weren’t even trying to do hybrid
so we know what the challenges are with
hybrid
we know what the extreme and bounding
cases are
we don’t yet know what is the best way
to
do these things or what is going to
represent best of breed
we certainly know how to run up bills
really really quickly
and how to burn people out but we don’t
know how to do this
efficiently all of the things you’ve
talked about there are
potential occurrences for for something
like that
and what we’ve got to work through to
virtualization i think this is going to
take
this is going to sort itself out over
the next 18 months as we all get used to
the hybrid model that we suspect
is going to become the new normal for
any
convention commercial fan otherwise um
is
is how to get there and um i put hybrid
in as part of the descriptor on
a techno management group that i created
you know about 10 minutes ago on this
forum so
maybe we’ve got a home to start sorting
out some of those problems
let me toss another one out there uh
jumping in that um
managing expectations it’s it was a fine
one that
we’re on a small zoom meeting and we can
all see each other’s faces
and um you know whatever interesting
virtual background you might have
um but when you go to the hybrid model
of you of having you know a very simple
example would be
uh if you have a panel of four people do
have one camera that shows the entire
room
so you can barely see somebody’s face
where do you have
multiple cameras that are switched
between the speakers
um do you do you have one audio feed or
do you have somebody
operating you’re switching around to the
different microphones
people people watching television
expect a lot more perfection than they
do out of live events
and translating the two you know yeah
you could put one camera in the room
sees everybody and so on um
easy to operate you need like one person
doing everything probably but how did
you
how do how do the people seeing it
remotely accept that
is that worth their time to watch it um
does it give them the value they’re what
they’re they’re trying to get
um so i’m one thing that i don’t really
talk about very often is i have been to
film school
and so when people talk in this very
blase way about of course we’ll go
hybrid
there is a part of me that’s going oh my
god do you understand how hard that is
because yeah um my like the setup i
would have in my head is you have
one camera that can see the whole panel
a second camera that’s doing close-ups
and so you’ve now instantly got three
people just doing visual you’ve got two
camera operators and a visual editor
switching between them
you also need a sound recordist you need
someone monitoring the stream
um if you’re doing this on hotel wi-fi
good luck
um you need someone monitoring the live
chat that’s coming in suddenly your
committee is going
boom i think people are more forgiving
than you might think about the
visual quality i mean if you watch bbc
news
they’re connecting via zoom i mean i’ve
done zoom ins to bbc news
professionally and the visual quality is
dreadful
people are generally pretty forgiving of
that they are not forgiving of bad
sound quality and that’s the thing that
people tend to neglect
um so yes you need a sound recordist i
mean most conventions these days do have
someone on a soundboard so there is at
least a mixer
but then you’ve got to be feeding that
into a camera you have to have someone
monitoring that it’s
yeah suddenly a very big operation and
that’s per room
yep it’s going to require a lot more
volunteers
and with certain skills as well yeah
a lot more volunteers and as i dropped
it in the chat your
your bandwidth goes up dramatically
and some places it’s cheap in some
places it is so
stupidly expensive that you won’t use it
at all
um i’m i’m pretty sure that you know as
far as the hotel wi-fi goes i’m pretty
sure that
the local convention boston sets up
their own
uh network uh to bypass the entire hotel
operations
well so some you can understand
some facilities let you do that and some
contractually don’t let you do that
um i mean if first of all depending on
wi-fi for your streaming is a recipe for
disaster
but you can usually get hard-wired
connections but you still need
you know at least five megabits each one
you know committed bandwidth um
and some facilities oh sure
you know whatever you need and some say
well you know we’ve got a 10 megabit
pipe out of the building
and that also and that also has our
point of sale
i see bang one of the things that may
change and maybe slower in the us than
in europe
like when i was in ireland and i think
some of the same things applies in the
uk
um you can buy 4g
and eventually it would be 5g
connections
right and like when i was visiting
various places around ireland
they didn’t have wired connections into
the hotel wherever
they they basically had a 5g router with
and
and the speed you can get was way higher
than 5 megabits so
if you if you were even just renting
that kind of technology one per room
you’d have enough for for streaming the
video out
and and getting data back in
so i think in the next couple years
the bandwidth connectivity issues will
be less of a problem but you’re still
going to have the other issues since
you’re going to have
all the volunteers in the clinical
business visual studio
basically what rachel mentioned yeah
and video just demonstrated some scary
technology
where it could stream at like 50k
a second um where it’s using deep
learning to essentially recreate you
after you’ve streamed uh
yeah it’s basically taking a still
picture and animating it
and it looks pretty good
that’s intriguing because that’s exactly
where mpeg-4
was trying to get mpeg-4 was originally
about
video conferencing and extremely low bit
rates
and standards include all that but
the technology never went there
well okay i’m gonna have to be going and
uh
i’d like to thank everybody for my uh
short presentation for attending
uh all right you triggered discussion
steve
thank you i picked up uh
a lot of notes as well and uh i would
like to
uh probably get in touch with uh
more than one of you at some point in
the relatively near future
uh so be expecting to hear from me
you can just make the connection there
and
remind me that we’re in the 21st century
and it would be good to have it
in the discussion groups because all of
us
could use the info and basically
share things in the discussion group all
right
well thanks again you’ll have a good
time
thank you
and yeah we sort of had a speaker
uh talking about a uh
kick kickback dot chat uh
which is another way of networking and
i don’t know what happened but
maybe in two weeks or so he can do a
demo
should we just carry on chatting in the
meantime i’d say
if one take a break carry on talking and
the next
one is at 12 30.
uh and i think i saw him here
yes perry he’s waving his hand
um i’d say let’s wait to start
perry’s talk at 12 30 just to keep stuff
on schedule
in case somebody wanted to come in later
they wouldn’t miss it
i’ll throw one just completely random
off
for for people to chew on that uh
something we realized with con zealand
is that there were a whole lot of policy
questions
that surrounded the virtual convention
that
do not affect do not apply to uh in
person
and of course i don’t have a list in
front of me but
some of it was you know how do you deal
with uh
payments um people who
uh decide you know people who sign up
pay money but their technology doesn’t
work
uh or their internet doesn’t work or
anything like that the accessibility
things that were mentioned earlier
of you know cost to attend um
you know how do you boot somebody if you
have a code of conduct violation
um you know what mechanisms do you have
available to keep them from coming back
in
uh it’s we ended up maze and i ended up
with a list of two or three pages of
those kinds of questions that uh
are one was what if you have a presenter
who you really want but they’re not
willing to use the platform
such as zoom that you’ve chosen how do
you
how do you deal with things like that um
and that’s we didn’t even get all those
questions answered for consealant
uh there were still pile of them hanging
but um
yeah on the code of conduct um i guess i
can say this now because we’re never
going to use excel events again
we only discovered a couple of days
before the convention
that we did not have a physical
mechanism to kick people out
we could revoke their ticket but as long
as they were logged in
we couldn’t forcibly log them out we
couldn’t even contact excel events and
ask them to do it
and we were really really worried about
that we decided to go for the option of
we’ll just keep this quiet
and hope no one calls our bluff and hope
that if it gets to a point where we ask
someone to leave
that they will i’m really really glad
that nothing came up that tested that
and that’s one of the other reasons i
would never go back to excel events
and that’s now a question that i know to
ask of any other platform
um yeah it’s scary that was
with with the con zealand we had
grenadine
we had zoom we had discord uh we had the
fantasy network
and you know a piece that i can’t
remember now
and that was actually one of our driving
forces early on trying to integrate all
of these was
if we have to boot somebody how can we
boot them and they stay booted
and some of it well and from there also
it was the separation of
who can perform the action versus who’s
allowed to authorize the action
you know the chairs if you were going to
boot somebody for the rest of the con
the chairs had to do that
but they didn’t know which buttons to
press and they shouldn’t know which
button buttons to press to make it
happen
whereas us down in the the tech trenches
had the reverse of that and getting all
that kind of stuff lined up too and
having some at least vague
procedure involved of you know if you
boot somebody if you’re using discord
do you have somebody available who has
who has the discord permissions to boot
somebody out of your server
can you reach them um oh the other one
was uh having a plan b
or plan c for everything that you know
if uh
you know specific case that in conceal
and
i was streaming out the closing ceremony
so i was going to stream out the closing
ceremonies
and a half hour before that my internet
started getting wonky
so somebody else did it because they
also had a copy of the file
and being able to pass that stuff around
and you can’t with the live convention
you can run over to the office and ask
them a question
and it’s hard when it’s three states
away
the other thing that worried us was if
what if a speaker doesn’t show up
it’s not like a physical con where you
can just go and drag them from the bar
um luckily that didn’t happen to us the
three people i mentioned who didn’t show
up were further pre-recorded game shows
so we just put a call out on twitter and
waited and it was fine because it was
pre-recorded
it was annoying but it was fine i’m
gonna i’m really conscious now that i
keep saying things are annoying
i wasn’t aware that that was a word i
said a lot i’m going to stop now it’s
i i go with it and that’s actually an
excellent thing of of
when you have you know a presenter
doesn’t show in
a live convention you can send somebody
into the room and say
um this person just called in sick they
won’t be here so it’s canceled
um well you’ve got to do the same thing
in a
virtual thing if they don’t show up and
um
the the model that a couple of the cons
that i’ve been involved with recently
did was they used um
either they used the zoom webinar and
had everybody coming into the practice
session a half hour early to get
everything
cameras and sound lined up or they used
a zoom meeting that was then streamed
into you twitch
and the attendees saw that so they could
put up a slide that said
you know this has been canceled or we’re
waiting for someone to show up
and things like that so your your
audience doesn’t say uh
is anybody gonna do where you know who’s
who’s doing this one
and then walk away confused
another policy thing that you need to
cover yeah and that’s
kind of also resource management like
who do you
have available to be those monitors or
that backup
attack um we have a
an ongoing class and the facilitator can
go into zoom claim oh
she’s very comfortable and i don’t have
to worry
about that happening or people logging
on because it’s been going on since
march but when she suddenly
has a doctor’s appointment and can’t
make it
then she’ll send out a message that
doesn’t necessarily get to everyone in
her
audience and i as the resource
behind that then log in and have to sit
on her class for
15 20 minutes for any stragglers and say
hey she can’t make it today there’s no
class
and it’s just it’s that kind of like do
you have enough people
uh do you have someone who’ll just be
that backup
uh for for research so we’re really
small it’s like me and my boss
who’s covering what and how do we find
volunteers to help us
i had questions about your use of
discord
um for stuff because i so one of the
people from my convention
even before all this pandemic stuff
happened he was like we should make a
convention discord server and da da da
da
and i was like i don’t have anybody to
run that are you volunteering
um but and there’s a lot of liabilities
and things like that but so i guess
did you just use did you create the
server just for the convention did you
close it afterwards is it still active
do you use it beforehand all that kind
of stuff
um i i can speak i’ll only stay for
concealed on this one
um that the intent
a server was created for uh for the con
it had a large staff of people to
operate
including channel moderators monitors
people to investigate
you know code of conduct stuff i really
don’t know how much of that
happened because i tried to stay away
from it uh they
intentionally i believe they
intentionally closed the discord server
to
all but staff basically like
eight hours after the end of the
convention because they said we’re not
going to have people to monitor it
you know if your staff you’ve already
signed the step all the staff stuff so
we hope we can trust you
um and then we’re closing it a week
later kind of thing
i actually don’t know if it’s still up i
haven’t looked i’m not a discord fan
but there was a lot of uh
a lot of people involved with making
that happen and
the reason we chose discord at all was
is as
actually a guy from the fantasy network
said it’s the best of the bad options
that it doesn’t integrate with anything
well um
it’s got all kinds of limitations on it
but a lot of people use and it kind of
works um
they did have a uh you know a bunch of
short videos about how to use it for
people who were not familiar
they had a possibly overly
complex system of roles but one of them
was that when you go into it the first
thing you
the first thing you see is this one
channel with this one message that says
if you agree to the code of contact
click the arrow below
and when you did that a bot gave you a
bunch of other roles
um but role management on discord was
a double hairball i
suspect that slack is no better possibly
even worse
um there are a bunch of other similar
systems out there
but didn’t have that a lot of you know
it’s one of those things it’s like
yeah there are other conference systems
besides zoom but it seems to work and
more people are familiar with it
and it seems to be improving over time
unlike some of them
i know allison scott who’s running the
punctuation
con is really huge into she says discord
is
everything for the virtual convention so
hopefully uh
she can pop on to here in the in the
future
something on it one of the things that
we saw with
uh you know with a couple of them
recently is
people letting the the the the
technology tale
wag the convention dog and
you know we somebody says we’ll we’ll
just put it up on twitch it’s like well
okay
you know there’s a whole bunch of
different streaming services out there
twitch is one of them youtubers you know
et cetera et cetera et cetera
what do you want to do you know do you
do you want
do you want a you want a stream that you
can embed on another web page
do you want a associated chat session
with it some kind of authentication
and it’s so easy to say
you know what we’ll just throw you know
if we’ll just fire up zoom meeting or
we’ll you know we’ll put it on
this and and they
or or the well zoom lets you do this
and we want to do that well does
anything else
you know there are a bunch of systems
out there um
the uh you do want a uh
a fairly integrated system like you know
the conference online
actually looks pretty cool it does a lot
of interesting stuff
um and it is frightfully expensive
um you know the uh
uh yeah rachel we looked at
almost all the ones that you looked at
and came to pretty much the same
conclusions on all of them
yeah i really liked the conference
online and they seemed nice it’s just
yeah
we’re out of our price range they had an
interesting
um interesting one that even they were
it was how many participants could they
put in a
uh presentation and the number was i
think six
and it’s like well if you want to have
two panels of three people in a
moderator
which is quite likely
they didn’t have a way to do it yeah
they had they had a hard limit there
little little things like that has
anybody um heard of a company called
jolokia i demoed
um demoed it right when we were doing
our first event
and it looked promising but it was a
little bit
price prohibited for what we wanted to
do from a recording perspective but
it’ll allow you to do your main stream
it’ll allow you to have
a multiple vendor rooms um that can be
loaded up either with live video or with
pre-recorded video
um something something’s looking to you
if you haven’t heard of it before
j-o-l-o-k-i-a
i believe write it down j-o-l-o-k-i-a
yep.com
if they’re pro their platforms called
inferno
so one thing that i really would like to
keep was everything being in a browser
just because we had so many people who
were
terrified of technology and
any anything that suggests downloading
software was just oh
no um we even had people not want to
come to our zoom
parties in the spring just because all
downloading zoom sounds scary
um so i do like everything being
embedded in a browser
i am a bit of a discord newbie i have
used slack before and it’s similar
um one thing i’ve really been struggling
with during punctuation con this weekend
is there’s just so many new messages
popping up
and you have to click on every channel
individually to see them
and sometimes it will highlight as
though there’s a new message but there
isn’t
i’ve just found that really irritating
and i’ve ended up not really
participating
so if there’s a channel you don’t want
rachel you can mute that channel so you
don’t get that notification
so i yeah i’m the opposite i want the
notifications i just don’t know where
they are without clicking on everything
and the other thing that was a bit weird
is um they did their talks on stream
yard
streamed to youtube which is fine um
but they didn’t have the live youtube
chat set to replay so after my talk i’m
like i want to go see what people said
on youtube
calm no idea maybe people were saying oh
she’s awful all the way through no idea
maybe that’s why they deleted it who
knows
a lot of times too there’s always
there’s the there’s a question of
resources to prepare the how to get
around
the convention because you’re so busy
actually planning how to
planning everything to happen that then
people and then everybody comes from all
the different
levels like how do i use zoom i don’t
you know your site isn’t
ie compatible sorry um
you know but but like even this one i
know we’ve got the
the the site j not a not a knock or
anything but there’s there’s a bunch of
cool things on
the um the virtual con con like there’s
the uh
high fidelity which i guess we might
talk about and then the other
uh the the chatting one right like the
um
like maybe if there was just a quick uh
how to get around the site and kind of
how to
connect with people in the buddy thing
which again we’re always we’re busy
trying to get set up
and without doing
yeah so the last session i’ll go over
the components of the site and what we
can do
oh cool
you know that gets back to um to the
training and policy thing is
pretty much everybody knows at this
point when you walk into a hotel
or you know something like that that you
know there’s probably a registration
desk to look for
and they’ll probably give you a program
book with a map in it and
you kind of got to get the same analog
in the electronic thing of you go here
and right in front of you is a
registration desk there are actually
some of the some of the 3d conferencing
systems
allow you to do that but they’re stupid
expensive
that’s something we tried to do with uh
with high fidelity um in for the 3d con
and uh actually dave uh dave heiser
who’s on here
um was it was great because uh for our
uh high fidelity chat room uh
we that was one of those sort of long
tail things i wanted to get together but
um didn’t get to until the end and then
we were in the kind of
the template room and uh and and dave
said hey i
what if you had this and i said are you
are you volunteering to to do that
because as we all know that at that
point you you say that and he said yes i
am and he
he just went crazy with it and he uh
he ended up setting up a lot of really
cool things
um and we tried he ended up getting the
um
this is the website which was sort of
based on
uh the the so this is this was the 46th
uh convention uh yearly convention but
this is the first one online obviously
so the but the high fidelity one um is
just what i wanted to show you so i have
to kill
i have to not use microphones or else
bad things will happen right
okay um so
so i guess the idea is that we try if
you haven’t seen high fidelity before
you can have uh multiple people in the
room and you can go and chat and it’s
like a spatial audio situation
um but he set up the the registration
table up here
and then you can kind of you can click
on things we tried to set up a little
trade fair over here
the idea is that like say michael brown
could be there’s a link to right to his
uh his page there and he could hang out
here and chat with people in here
and make purchases then you could go and
chat so
that’s good i guess that was our attempt
to um to get this
here you’re landing here’s your
registration table
and that kind of thing
okay it’s coming up on time for perry’s
talk
so just give me a moment to restart the
recording

okay
i’d like to introduce perry lawrence uh
he’s going to talk about exo
uh take it away awesome thanks guys
thanks so much
for uh hanging out i know you’re not
hanging out
just for me but the fact that you’re
sticking out on the sunday is
is very awesome so um
i am going to um well first
my background is broadcast engineering
i’ve been brought involved in um
[Music]
interactive television since the late
80s so
i’m a dinosaur when
time warner was testing out their uh um
platform and and doing um interactive
television so
and nothing’s worked up until uh now and
so i would say we’re now in the era of
interactive tv if this isn’t interactive
tv that i don’t know what is
but i want to show you um so i went from
doing
um in-person events uh you know
600 attendees typically
big large imag screens in the front of
the room to
doing them virtually having to do them
virtually so
we pivoted very quickly and we started
doing
the virtual events for for clients and
folks and
the advantage of those were that we were
able
typically we charge and typically we
have a large backend
sales funnel and our
virtual events have um seriously
outperformed our live events
as far as profitability uh obviously you
no longer have the
the the live costs i mean we were flying
you know large groups of people around
all over the country um
hotel costs et cetera et cetera
equipment costs so all of that
kind of went away with the the virtual
stuff so
we went to doing virtual webinars and
uh had the extreme success with that
success with that um and
i was introduced recently um to a
company that
does um
well zeo so what zeo does is
they took a platform that they were
using for the nfl
in uh stadium situations where
people would be able to interact off
their second screen and what’s their
second screen
as their cell phone so we’ve they’ve
taken that um
technology that platform and they’ve
scaled it
to virtual events just like this so i
want to
show you a couple of things um
uh this is a hugely geeky audience but i
want to show you the results first and
then we can dig into the back end if we
have time or take some questions so
i’m going to pop up on my screen a uh qr
code so
take a take a picture of the qr code
it’ll lead you to our url
and i’m told this works all over the
world so
um you should see a screen that says
welcome to zeo after you
do this so um on any iphone if you point
your camera to the qr code a little
um drop down will come up with the with
the url that you can click on
and uh uh that’s that works pretty well
so let me know i hold up your phone you
should have something like this on it
well let me take that off hold on should
have something like this on it when you
do connect
i’ll put this up for one more minute or
a few more seconds so people can grab it
if they haven’t
and if it’s stuck on loading just hit
the um
refresh button so it’s going to ask you
your
phone number and then it’s going to give
you a confirmation code thanks rachel b
so rachel b’s on
excellent she gave me a thumbs up um so
what it’s going to do it’s going to ask
you for
your phone give it your phone your
country and your phone
we have an international audience here
so that’s exciting
we’re gonna test this to the limits um
and and really the whole point of zeo is
let me take this off here the whole
point of zeo
is to provide better
engagement with your audience so
you know everybody struggles with the
the
the the virtual
haze let’s call it so when you’re at a
live event
if you’re drooling you know somebody’s
going to kick you
or somebody’s going to give you a nudge
and let you know hey you know this is
you know this is what’s going on here
you want to wake up for this um in a
virtual
space where it’s just your audience
member
in their office you know sequestered and
cloistered up
their coffee’s running low they’re
they’re not engaged
how do you get people more engaged
so we believe we have a very
very good solution on how to do this
so if everybody likes
engagement look at your look at your
screen here
who wants interactions clap on that
and when you do that
look at this oh man look at that
so you can see hopefully you can see
this here you go
who wants engagements seven people are
online seven first timers
we’ve got everybody loving the fact
that we want interactions and
this falls into the whole gamification
of interactivity and
e-learning so if you’re hosting a con if
you’re hosting an event a training event
if you’re hosting a a webinar whatever
the end goal
is going to be what did they walk away
from what did they learn what was the
net
takeaway so you want to engage them as
much as possible and leave them with a
memorable
repeatable thoughtful takeaway
that they can then take action on
whether it’s to come to the next event
buy some swag buy your coaching
buy whatever so obviously
keeping people engaged with the
gamification helps
zio has a very powerful engine
and this that i’m showing you right now
is is one of my favorites
it allows you to do full screen
this screen is completely customizable
on the interactions
i can do it a sidebar i can do it as a
lower third this part of it
i absolutely love coming from a video
background
rachel you you probably dig it too
coming from a film background
i can show how the entire audience
is loving this and this is based on
uh what we call cards so what i’m going
to do is i’m going to go play the next
one
and show you just some some i’m going to
basically run
through this and show you what um
people are or what
interactions are available so this is
what we call the good bad interaction
and this is completely interaction is it
good or bad i’m going to do a thumbs up
so the questions completely configurable
the um icons are completely configurable
um these panels that i’m showing you now
are completely configurable
so a very robust um uh
interaction very robust ability to
customize this
to to look and feel however you want i’m
gonna go to the next
uh the next one this is a what we call a
sentiment slider so if you have the
totally agree slider at the very top
you can slide this the different faces
show up
and i’m going to leave mine on agree 100
totally agree awesome
uh so um
so we all agree that interaction is
valuable so the way to get people to
interact is to
give some questions just like i have
simple yes no
and they can interact another popular
and powerful way to get people to
interact is
with um this is called a poll
so why is engagement important
eliminates distractions
fortifies learning
leads to more sales all of the above i’m
gonna click all of the above and hit
submit
there we go leads to more sales leave
some more sales all of you but look
we have a split decision so 25 say all
of the above
25 okay so you get the idea of how
cool this is i love this and so
this can be a great tool
throughout the event but
it doesn’t have to be a hundred percent
of the event
at specific times you can call up the
question
and then engage the audience so that’s
what i’ve done here i’ve taken off the
lower third
i can then set up you know go back to a
slide go back to an image
um and uh you know park it there while
we’re going through the training or the
learning and then when time comes back
up
i can start a new slide this one’s
really cool
this is one of my favorites
uh there we go okay this is sound off
what do you want to do
scream applaud or air horn i want to
scream
you can see the different interactions
there
all right people love this yes people
love this that’s how good it is
all right so that’s a lot of fun
and you can see the little meter here
you we can
also pipe this audio back
into the feed so um you’re actually
hearing what the entire audience is
doing it gets a bit
can get a bit annoying so we don’t want
to stay on that one
too long we have two forms of trivia
i’m going to show you the simple trivia
here first let’s play this game
and whoever wins with the leaderboard
most points i’m going to send them a 25
starbucks
gift certificate so what do we got
all right all right a lot of people on
the send
danube the blue danube
i believe that’s uh not in france so
that
this sent is the right question i’m
gonna give you one more ques let’s do
another one
uh how many u.s presidents have been
elected for two terms
oof
uh let me do this here here we go
hold on full screen
all right well there’s four answers one
two three four and
the correct answer is
12 and the 12 isn’t on my display so i
got to fix that
so you can see how fun this is though it
gets everybody
excited gets everybody
engaged gets everybody playing along
i’m going to show you a poll right now
that this is what we call a branching
poll
and really this the importance of this
is the ability and
your ability for data collection
very powerful that during your event you
can get specific data
from your audience members so on this
poll depending on how you
answer the first question you’ll get a
second
question that’s different so if you
answer a to the first question
you’ll get another question that’s
specific to a if you answer b
to that first question you’ll get a
second question that’s specific to b
so let’s do that that’s called a
branching pole
so right now are you a dog or a cat
person
oh my gosh that can’t be right
all right there we go all right a lot of
cat people
okay so based on that question
you’re going to get a different question
depending on
what you answer for the first one so i’m
going to do this
hold on
uh you should see yeah
well let’s do this uh i’m going to reset
this one
we’re going to answer it again because i
don’t i think i have to reset both of
them
so here we go here we go let’s do it
again one more time dog or cat person
there we go everybody’s submitting thank
you very much for playing along
i forgot to reset those all right so now
based on that
here’s your second question
okay people who have a dog you know
got what kind of dog people who answered
cat
were why just kidding
just kidding all right
um uh let me show you
um two more things here and then then i
can show you the back end if you would
like to see it
so um not only do you have the ability
to
send websites images
you can have buttons that you can share
those images
let’s you know say you’re at steve’s
amazing stories
con you can have some great magazine
covers that you can have a share button
so for example like this
um
for example like this this image right
here
can be interactive
that’s on your phone let me put it up on
the screen here
uh yeah
oh i can do it this way sorry
so that image can be uh interactive it
can be uh the image can have a link
i can change the text at the top and i
can also have a share button so the
share button will share the image
with um whoever i want if i’m on on a
iphone
it’ll obviously a little have i can
share it
via text via message et cetera et cetera
there’s two there’s a couple more
features that we can do
this is a video i’m going to show you a
video
and so this is how this zeo is used in
sports stadiums
so i can play this in
the main view or i can have you
play it on your phone either way watch
unmute etc so i can deliver content
while the events going on that either is
or isn’t
part of the experience which is really
nice
so um i’m going to put up my uh
man let’s do this i’m going to show you
the back end now
because i know this is a geeky crowd
which i really love
uh so here let’s go just do this
so here’s the back end um cards
uh are every event is based on a card
i can add new cards based on
just by clicking a plus button thumbs up
applications
applause sorry slider sound off
here’s uh the poles in the trivia we now
have a different
and new uh a game called super turbo
trivia
and i’m going to show you a couple of
these arcade games here in a minute
the branching pole that’s that target
that’s what that was
that i showed you earlier um to get one
to pop up
i just click on that i’m going to reset
it and play it again and there it is
or i can click on this reset it and play
it
and there it is as you see on the right
hand side
i’ve got full screen ability this is
called the main screen and that’s what
you’re seeing
if i do this
if i do that that’s called the main
screen
and that can be either full screen it
could be
lower third like we had talked about
or it can also be um side panel or lower
third either way
i always have a view of the screen and
what’s being output
sort of a or more or less a confidence
view that’s right here
um in the where you see the hands and
then there’s a running timeline that
keeps track of where i am or just
actually records um my
uh the card sequence i can actually save
that and replay that
should i want to um
i’m going to show you what time we got
okay i got a little bit of time left so
i’m going to show you
a couple of games so we’ve done some
trivia games which is fun
and
right now i’m going to show you
some powerful games so here we’re going
to do a game
called uh skee-ball hold on
skee-ball where are you ski ball
here we go so
as it’s loading up we can see it loading
up it’s going to be
i set the load up time to be 25 seconds
and i can also show you this here so the
cool thing about this is i can talk
this excite can be a branded for your
company
or your sponsor and while i’m talking
getting people excited about skee-ball
saying hey if you win this you know
you get your 25
starbucks card and now it goes into the
game
and all you do is swipe up with your
thumb and who can score the highest in
30 seconds
wins and your scores on the side totally
brandable up top with logos
but keep but go so who’s going to win
skee-ball who’s going to win it are you
in it to win it
got 20 seconds left keep going get that
thumb moving
who’s the skee-ball champ who is the
skee-ball
champ can you beat me can you beat
the odds can you beat the high score
seven seconds left keep going don’t give
up
keep going don’t give up
[Applause]
there we go what was your
high score well let’s see we can go to
uh a leaderboard and and check it out um
my leaderboard if i show it
i get uh i get i can’t figure out how to
get out of the leaderboard
so i’m not gonna show that to you right
now uh but
hopefully you guys enjoyed that let’s do
one more actually let’s do a couple more
um i’m gonna do
uh one called hat shuffle so this
doesn’t even need an explanation so
let’s do hat shuffle
can you win it are you in it to win it
all right there’s a little countdown
again again there’s a logo
that can be totally branded tap it to
play to start
hat’s gonna cover the ball when the hat
goes over the ball
we’re gonna guess where it is guess
where the hat is keep your eye on the
hat
guess your eye on the hat where’s the
hat again for littler kids younger
audiences maybe
but again it’s a fun distraction now tap
where you think the hat is and it says
you selected
hat blah blah blah and in 15 seconds
after everybody’s
selected that you’re going to
see exactly who won
and again the logos on the hat
completely brandable
yes it was on hat one
yeah buddy all right
so um do i have anything else to show
you
um well let me uh
take some questions here and if
anybody has any and i can can show you
something else or
uh answer some some questions
harry i have a heap of questions yes
okay so firstly um does the tool allow
you to
change your choice because i found i was
making a choice and then going oh that
was wrong
um no uh yeah
no it it it’s gonna take your first
impulse
all right um all right second question
keep it fair because you know to answer
that john it’s a great question though
to keep it fair so the the if i’m
showing you the lower third for example
um uh
yeah if i’m showing you the lower third
why is that not doing that if i’m
showing you the lower third
right if i show you the lower third that
was my my next question was about lower
thirds
now if i show you the lower third for
example it’s going to have the score in
there
um and so that’s uh
why is that not doing that interesting
i think i got my thing but is is that
fixed or is that
is it an option that you allow or
disallow people from changing their
minds
i can tell you in two seconds hold give
me one second that’s a great question
uh trivia
so i’m gonna take this offline actually
i can show you guys this i think while
i’m doing it
if you would like
so i went into offline mode and now i’m
going into
a trivia i’m going to double click on
here here’s the setup card for the
trivia here’s the questions
here are the answers and uh no i don’t
believe it is
a an adjustable i’m gonna go into global
settings
uh points
no anybody else but i’m not seeing
anything change on the no i think i
think the reason being and
like i said it’s a really good question
is the reason being that if i’m showing
you the scores
uh for example like this uh
for example like this you know in one of
these panels if i’m showing you the
score somebody could wait to the very
last minute and go with the uh
uh go with the uh whoever had the most
so
yeah that’s a great question uh
something we can add for sure but
um well i’m i’m thinking that you you
might actually want to see
what the changing trend is as people
are exposed to an answer okay um lower
thirds is that you doing
that externally how are you putting the
lower third on the screen
right now i’m just doing it with a
little um desktop switcher um
a little vmax yeah oh okay good yep so
so it’s a great question let me let me
just show you that for a second
well the idea behind that if
if i’m here i can go
to right click on here and
here’s the main main board which which
it has been displaying
you know the the the leader board the
the scores the lower thirds etcetera
and so that i’m just feeding that into
i’m not seeing anything changing on your
shared screen by the way i don’t know if
that’s anybody else but
yeah you’re right static
so that’s the main board yep okay yep
yep
um and there’s there it is with uh you
can’t see it here you can see it here
there it is with the green screen key in
it so i’m just keying out the gun
okay so okay yep good so it’s lower
third side panel full screen yep
all right um with the president’s
question i don’t know whether this
it might have been after i made the
choice then i i got a green and a
and a red overlay that said
you’re an idiot you don’t know anything
about u.s presidents yeah go figure
[Laughter]
i know a lot about one of them right
exactly everybody does
yeah everybody does um
yeah any other any other questions uh
surrounding you know what
what uh so again this is an interactive
tool
it’s it’s designed to keep people
engaged but it’s also designed
for you to be able to collect some
decent information um some data
on data points if you need them for
example we do a lot of
real estate investing webinars
live events and so the ability to you
know to determine
are you interested in a b or c class
properties are you interested in these
markets for example
um
i think it’s what john just asked i’m
not sure if i just didn’t understand the
answer
um so when you’re adding the lower third
is that
then acting as a virtual camera and zoom
or using third-party software to do that
i’m using third-party software
right okay yeah
i i scanned at your qr code it loaded
the app and so forth
but the app so i assume it’s a web app
or something
because when i exited my scan program
halfway through the your presentation
the app also exited but i don’t see the
app on the phone so it’s
it’s uh i personally it’s in the browser
or something right
it’s in the browser this is called a wap
um application
yeah so you know
addressing rachel’s concern earlier that
there’s no download to your phone
it’s just it’s all over a browser um
all the games are on a cdn so they’re
extremely
responsive and um i’m going to turn this
back on so i want to show you something
here real quick
can i do that
um yeah uh
my systems i can’t get back to where i
wanted to go
oh there we go uh harry we’re
about half time so in a minute or two
wrap it up please
absolutely i’m wrapped up thank you guys
i really appreciate you taking the time
can we have the applause thing please
yes
i can’t get my uh i’ve switched a
browser so
i’m not on anymore but thank you rachel
b thank you rachel livermore everybody
appreciate your attention thank you
thank you
um so to everybody interesting thing
the main website is down
i think crashed
so going forward i think it’s worth
having a
backup website with the basic info
on a separate domain separate host and
service
complete redundancy and all email
communications
would have that backup in case
the main site goes down uh jay
uh what i was going to suggest we do
this we do this a lot is basically use
the cdn
and put something like cloudflare in
front of it so that if you do go down
these people get the cached pages
okay uh that’s something i don’t have
experience with
great thing to look into and
it’s not that it’s not that difficult
actually um
i think if you go to cloudflare you can
you the basic setup should be able to
cover what you
for most of what you wanted to do here
as long as the pages are marked as
casual
yeah cool okay that’s something that
would be
when the site comes back a best
practices
because we’re all geeky can you tell us
what it is that has crashed
i have no idea it’s just your whole site
has crashed
i’m i’m with namecheap
sites crashed i’ll try going to cpanel
cpanels down
uh so maybe they lost the server or
something
don’t know oh okay so i’m going to stop
the recording for a sec
i’m just going to make sure john if if
you go to the right if you have the page
cached locally in your browser you still
see it but if it goes out to the server
you don’t it says it’s inaccessible

data for worldcon where we knew what
would happen
in a live room if the presentation fell
apart and people would typically make
something up in the room i had a really
great experience at
a con where people just didn’t turn up
for a thing called the klingon
dating game and some people who are in
hall costume
made something up and it was hilarious
and it was well worth being in the room
for an hour
you can’t do that virtually because
nobody actually knows what is going on
and part of the thing that
i had to do for my team when i set up a
thing called mission control
to run worldcon and monitor it was to be
able to tell the difference between a
local fault
uh this is your browser and a system
fault we have lost the world
we have lost the internet and you can’t
tell that immediately
okay uh let’s introduce
burke i’m sorry it’s okay it’s a tricky
name
um hi everyone i’m maria it’s like a ray
of sunshine
um i’m based in california and excited
to
join you from all over the world it
seems like it’s cool
um my background is in creating
physical events normally i put together
big festivals i organize a dessert
festival
and a romantic comedy film festival
thousands of people
eating enjoying touching each other
obviously have had to
totally change everything this year as
all other event organizers have and so
planned a few different virtual events
earlier in the year
using zoom and vimeo and building on my
squarespace website and different
tools and got in touch with the founder
of
mixley a new event hosting platform and
just loved what he was doing so much so
ended up
totally pivoting my journey this year
and joining
the mixley team to develop out this tool
and make a better experience for other
organizers like myself
so um if i can share my screen
yes i would love to show everyone what
we’re working on at mixley
and if anyone has
questions on it
can share more let’s see
there we go
okay can everyone see that
um great so i for my festivals
used to use eventbrite all the time was
sort of our go-to
for selling tickets for events and
really just
hated the clunkiness of it i don’t know
if any of you have had experience with
eventbrite but
both as an organizer putting together an
event takes a lot of steps there’s kind
of
hidden sections that you don’t
necessarily see
and as a attendee when you’re checking
out
you have to enter your email address
like three times you have to have an
eventbrite account to check out
plus they charge really high fees so
that was kind of the first thing we’ve
been trying to fix with mixley is this
eventbrite alternative
a cleaner more beautiful and cheaper
platform to be able to
sell tickets to your events so this is
our homepage is mixley.com
um our hosting your event just got
easier
so i’m gonna show you how fast it is to
create an event
and right now it’s totally free for free
events
on mixley and then we charge just a very
small
fee for ticketed events so it’s just one
percent of each ticket sold
plus 30 cents so compared to eventbrite
is charging like 3.5
um per ticket and companies like splash
and others are charging even more so
say um jay if you’re doing meetups once
a month or something and you wanted a
nice
place to be able to invite people to
them you could use nextly for that
even for birthday parties people are
using it for book clubs
for private events or for your
professional
conferences or conventions so this is
creating an event
you can change the photo so if you know
what kind of event it is say we’re doing
a virtual con con it’ll give you some
examples of photos that you can use or
you can upload your own
and then you can change the name of the
event
um here and then if it’s ticketed or
free so if it’s free you can have it as
free or if it’s ticketed you say
ticketed
what day and time the event will be
happening
and you can check pick the time zone and
wherever in the world your attendees are
they will see the event in their time
zone which i think is so helpful i know
like for this event i had to
clarify with jay as to what time it was
so with this
no matter where you are the attendees
will see it in their time
or you can pull your guests so if you
want to host a meetup and you want to
have like three different times and have
your attendees pick when they want it to
be
you can create a poll for them and have
a few different options for them
to pick between and obviously right now
we’re in this world of
virtual but also some people are
starting to do in person we’re doing a
lot of hybrid events with people where
it’s a mix of in-person
and virtual so you can pick where it is
if it’s in if you’re hosting it on zoom
you can add in the url
google hangouts youtube live wherever it
is
add in some event details images
[Music]
how much the tickets are whether it’s a
fixed price or a suggested donation
and a confirmation message here so you
can put the zoom link
in here for if you’re selling tickets
any promo codes and create an event
and that is how fast it is to create one
and you can see like a preview of what
it looks like so it’s a bit
cleaner than some eventbrite ones um
and then you can create an account
to save it and i’ll just log into my
existing account so you can see kind of
what the backend looks like
um so this is
uh once you’re logged in and have an
account
on your home page you can see all your
upcoming events
and all your past events um and there’s
a lot of great tools that we have
like contact lists so if you’re hosting
events regularly
you can create a list of names and
invite people
based on those events so whether it’s
your friends and family list
or an la list or maybe it’s a book club
and then your meetup list you can have
all those contacts in there so that you
can easily
invite them out kind of like a paperless
post similarity i would say
and then in your dashboard you can see
all the stats and how much money you’ve
made
how many tickets and we also have this
great listing page
where you can create a listing that’s
embeddable
on your website of all upcoming events
so
super simple uh you embed just a little
bit of code block into your site
and then every time you make a new event
on mixley it will auto populate onto
your website so we have
yoga teachers and people are hosting
regular events
that don’t necessarily know how to code
or add on their website or don’t want to
have to link back and forth each time
make an event on mixley and then right
away it’s all shared on
um on to their website and
yeah there’s a lot of other little
things kind of hidden in
um that are great features that we have
that are really based on
my talking to a lot of hosts and being
an organizer myself
and i think one of the things we’re most
excited about right now too
is we’ve just launched our new virtual
venue
um which is based on talking to a lot of
people
who are hosting events such as yourself
and realizing that a lot of people are
using youtube
or zoom or other platforms to have where
their event is
happening and so they’re collecting the
emails they’re selling the tickets but
then they’re sending
everyone to this other site into the
world
as opposed to having them come back to
their site and the problems with zoom or
youtube is is distractions and lack of
being able to really own
the venue and so we’ve created this new
virtual venue that
is code that can live on your website
and be
branded um and you can actually
we’re doing now our we’re calling it a
virtual usher
as we can actually check tickets and
make sure people are actually attending
the event who have purchased a ticket
because that’s a problem a lot of people
are having too is they might register
for a con concert online and then
send that same zoom link to a bunch of
friends and organizers have a hard time
really checking that
so we can check it on the back end make
sure people are joining who are actually
supposed to be
and then brand out the website so when
they
are watching the performance it lives
within
on their web page in a really seamless
and branded way and also offer
opportunities to sell merchandise or
other things directly through
your website so we’re sort of beta
testing this um
product right now we have a few users
right now there’s a
venue called lightbox in new york city
that’s been doing a hybrid event this
weekend where they have an art show
going on
in new york and they have tickets um
that you can go in person and watch it
with like 10 other people or you can
watch the whole experience
online um and manual cinema is one that
we’re testing out with them for their
big christmas carol
performance next month but yeah that’s
like
super speedy of what mixley is but
would love if anyone has thoughts or
questions or ideas and
um happy to talk more or
brainstorm based on what anyone else is
working on
yeah um i don’t know if i can call
on people but uh everyone can
unmute and say by name
where how do i stop there we go um john
maria okay whole heap of questions first
one
is um by the way this looks like
something i could use for an annual
general meeting that is coming up in
probably about three weeks
i would actually really like as a i’m a
um power
eventbrite user i would like to try this
as an alternative
for all the reasons you mentioned um
okay first question
uh you’ll you’ll pick my accent being
international
so it’s around dates and date formats um
are there options for day month year uh
in words as well as numbers and year
month day
dates display in 24 hour clock
not 12-hour clock and localization so
that
every time that is given every time
stamp
also has the zone with it
so that there is absolutely no ambiguity
yeah
i do not think we have yet the day month
year
option definitely a month’s day or your
month day i mean yeah
um it’s just one set way right now
but potentially is something that we
could customize for you i think what’s
exciting of our phase of like young
scrappy startup it’s like me and two
engineers as we can
do those tweaks fast potentially um but
the time zones yes that’s definitely
something that we
have where people can see it in their
time zone with the
with the staff that’s really exciting
that’s a that’s a major
a major thing i know um
several people who are or were on this
call would would relate to that so
um in europe and you know in a lesser
part in this part of the world but year
month day is actually quite
important certainly it’s unambiguous 24
hour clock definitely
um the other one i noticed when you when
you said okay this could be
a virtual conference event
or a physical event um how soon could
you put a hybrid button in there
that would allow you to put in both
because people might want to be able to
choose
which of those they want and they might
actually want to be at the venue
but then while they’re driving home be
virtualized and so be able to
say look i’m participating both yeah
we have that already um now i can show
you
so we’re doing this for an event that
was happening this weekend in new york
and we um let’s see
if it’s still up yes
here let me show real quick so it’s uh
we tried to make it as like
easy to use that anyone can do right now
so this
is this event happening in new york
right now creative code festival
and that listing page is something that
every mixley user can create where you
have sort of
sort of an eventbrite where you have
your host page but you don’t have a lot
of
customization there it’s just links all
your events
this you can upload your photo you can
make
text that you want and then you pick
which ticket types that you want
displayed
so for lightbox we have their one hour
pass
their four day pass or their virtual
pass and people can come in
and so for the one day this is our
virtual venue
um kind of setup where we have a run for
them which
i love because i’ve done a lot of events
on eventbrite over multiple day and they
really are not set up for that
and so with this you can pick okay i
want to go
saturday at what time you pick your
tickets um
and check out and we can have a cap of
how many people per time slot
because that’s obviously really really
important right now with covid
is with this venue they could only have
like 10 people per time slot
we segmented it out for them we have one
hour passes
we also have four day passes
so we with them we recommended like a
morning pass or an evening pass so we
have these two different ticket types
and then the virtual is the third
ticket option where it’s just the one
pass you sign up
and then once you get it you receive the
link to watch it
online um so this is hybrid in action
right now
so it won’t it wouldn’t be on one ticket
type it’d be different ticket types for
virtual and um in person but then
hosted together on your listing page
with different fees like i just wanted
to say to somebody
your call you can turn up at the venue
or you can participate
from home if that’s what you want yeah i
guess you could do that on the same
event then if you wanted to and if i
think you would
you could have two ticket types if it
was as simple as that because this was a
little more complicated with the hour
time slots
if it was we have one um event that does
a yoga class
that’s in person and online and so she
just has different ticket types within
one event where it says like in person
twenty dollars online five dollars and
set it up like that
with our virtual venue feature right now
we have to have the virtual pass as its
own
um ticket type just because of the
security of it
but if you just wanted to have a link to
zoom or something else then it would be
easier to just have
here’s my virtual attendees here’s my in
person here’s the link to access it
okay thank you yeah
yeah and if there’s any other things
you’ve been trying to do i think we’re
it’s it’s live and people are using it
and then we’re also simultaneously in
the like what else can we do to make it
better phase right now
just listening to people and hearing how
we can improve it so
this weekend we’ve been working with
lightbox and kind of have a list for our
engineers now of like
four more things we’re gonna fix and
make it better for next time
actually what payment gateways do you
take right
yeah right now everything is just
through stripe is the only one
so credit card processing
yeah what what are you using now
for your events for the most part uh
eventbrite we just use eventbrite
because that’s
them and on our membership website we’re
already using stripe
okay yeah which membership website do
you use
oh okay well this is with a
not-for-profit group um that i run
and we’re using a membership site called
zenbeship that looked like it was going
to be
really really wonderful but the guy
stopped developing it
oh no so yeah it’s fabulous but yeah
we’ve talked to a lot of people who use
member stack
i think it’s called um so we’ve been
talking through different ways of kind
of integrating this
with membership communities as well i
think there’s a need for that of people
who are hosting like every week member
events and want an easier way for their
members to be able to access things
member stack okay i’ve written that down
yeah thank you
um yeah any other
thoughts have has anyone else kind of
entered into hybrid events at all or is
everything
fully virtual i guessing for the most
part
virtual world um yeah i think it’s
it’s i’m starting to see it in like
small doses the hybrid
um and i think what we’re excited with
mixley is i
there’s so many new sites obviously
eventbrite has been around the longest
but there’s so many new sites now
that are just focusing on the virtual
and so we’re trying to help be the
solution for both
um as hopefully you know next year we’ll
be back and able to do some things in
person
um i don’t think virtual events are
going anywhere
but to be able to empower hosts to be
able to do both in
an easier way as opposed to learning a
whole new
platform and system and then having to
learn a whole new one
as they’re doing in person again
so for the contact lists uh email
reminders
do you have limits on the number of
contacts
um yeah it seems like it could become
sort of like a
constant contact system yeah i think we
are
hoping right now there’s not so a great
opportunity to take advantage of it now
i think eventually we’re thinking
through subscription
models and having it be like a ten
dollar per month
fee that you get for certain extra
features
whether that’s like more contacts having
no
fees for any of your tickets is
something that we’re testing out right
now
um some people host events regularly or
really high to get
ticket prices so they really hate the
fees so having one flat fee and then you
don’t have to worry about fees
but yeah right now um there’s no limit
for contact so even like
with this event today jay i was thinking
like hey i registered but i
didn’t couldn’t find the zoom link like
if you had a list of
everyone who had registered and you
could have emailed everyone this morning
like
here’s the zoom link how to access it i
feel like that
would be helpful for future gatherings
yeah i have enjoy who made the contact
list yet
yeah yes that’s the first step is making
the contact list
um and but yeah even after
after this event happens today then
messaging everyone through the website
or anyone who is on zoom and seeing who
wants to
join for future ones and grabbing their
emails
[Music]
but yeah if anyone has any other
questions i
put my email in um in the chat
and have been having just lots of like
one-on-ones with people again my
background is in
creating events so i have a lot of chats
with people just like helping them
brainstorm how to move
to the world of virtual and how to help
make it easier i think
everyone is so good at what they do
um but trying to market it trying to set
up the tech of it all these things is
like such a new
learning for everyone so trying to help
in any way that we can um
but yeah thanks for the opportunity to
share
um thank you do you have any examples of
the virtual
hosting page yeah
um let’s see so that creative code
was one of them um
let’s pull up some others
[Music]
um
so this is one um
is a dating um dating events that use
um that use mixley so she’s
not using the listing page on her site
this is her own
but then when you click register
it brings to the mixley listing page
um so this
is like what the image would look like
hosted by the time zone and you see it
says what time zone it is
um in my local and pst in the where she
says zoom link will be provided
with registration you can add in
details here you can link to things
and then for her she has three different
ticket types available
you pick which quantity you want you can
add promo codes
and i really like so the checkout
experience um so say i wanted to
attend you click one you she has you can
add your phone number if you want you
don’t have to have that
and the check out oh i guess you have to
add it for hers
when you check out it just takes you to
a strike page
so then you just check out through
stripe as opposed to eventbrite where
you literally have to enter your email
three times every time you check out
so it’s just a very clean checkout
experience
um so that’s an example of
one um this is another she hosts cooking
events
um using mixley so this is on her
website
is zaza’s kitchen
and go to events
and then here is her this is the listing
page through mixley that is embedded on
so it has
a title it has a description it has a
photo
and then these are linked to mixley
right now so you would just
click on get tickets and then it goes
directly
to the mixley page so it’s a really nice
just like one less step that hosts have
to be thinking about
so this is hers she used to use
eventbrite and just moved over recently
and has been really happy
she has higher price tickets too so it’s
like fifty dollars so
she’s saving like four dollars per
ticket sold on fees
basically so yeah there’s another
example
[Music]
and how fast do we get the money
yeah that’s a great question so it’s all
set up through stripe so you if once you
set up your stripe account
and link it in you get paid directly
through stripe
and it’s within two days of each ticket
sold
so that’s also a big help as opposed to
eventbrite where it’s at the end of your
event
we are not holding on to anyone’s money
it’s all just going from stripe
to you so what about refunds
so um if if the money has come through
that quickly there’s no buffer but if
somebody says oh you know i want a
refund and your refund policy is
yeah we’ll give you 100 back does are
you able to
handle that definitely so you can still
um we recommend having the refund policy
listed on your page um it’s a little
manual we’ve been helping with refunds
there’s not
a way for the host to do it directly in
your account right now
but we can go through on like the master
stripe and refund it
for you to them
are you will you be heading to a point
where that’s sort of like fully
automatic that
if somebody requests a refund within the
policy that it and it all unravels and
they get the money back and
you’re not involved yeah i think that’s
the hope that it will be right now
there’s a lot of
um extra hand-holding things that we are
helping with just that
um we don’t have all built out yet um
but we our customer service it’s like
myself
and the founder that’s answering all the
calls and the emails so
we are very fast with helping with
anything um
um but yeah so definitely the payout if
you’re doing
um regular events or high ticket events
that i know it’s really hard a lot of
hosts i’ve talked to where they are
like shipping things to people they have
to wait to get paid out
until like a week after the event
happens on a lot of other platforms so
trying to help empower these small
businesses
um and independent creators to get their
money as fast as possible
thank you yeah
um anything else that i can
help on what’s next on the schedule
uh this is about it for the other
speakers
um i had posted the mars
uh interview both of our society so if
people
have any questions discussions about
that
and i’ll go over the plugins and tools
and
how this mess came to be
okay thank you i’m going to stop
recording
and does people want to take a break
thanks maurice for a round of applause
thank you
thanks mariah so jay what happens next
um if we want to take a break
you know i’ll just leave the room going
and we could come back here in like
10 or 15 minutes and
as i was planning just showing what went
into making this site
uh general discussion
thoughts about going forward maybe
meeting again in two weeks informally
and just make sure you see the different
forums etc on here
okay

setting up
the hamsters are slow
okay okay
so um hello i am ceo of kickback
and what are we making well as we know
similar it’s kind of very similar to
wander uh in the sense that like
i’m solving the problem of being able to
have side conversations in
virtual event environments
um and through this process i’ve
actually identified that there’s
four main areas that people are looking
for in this
space which are games education
uh business and virtual parties
so uh through a lot of research people
have been looking at
you know my product kickback and they’ve
been like oh my god can i use this for a
virtual classroom can i use this
for uh to play games with my friends
and i want to the goal of my product
is to attack a
attack where all of those circles
overlap
but to begin off to start off with my
product what makes it different from the
other things
like wander or any of the other apps
well one thing that i’ve noticed through
a lot of research
is that there is a big problem with
spatial audio and how many of you guys
are familiar with the
the term spatial audio so essentially
it’s the you know you have circles
and this is what most of the circle the
spatial audio apps look like
and they have a they set a distance
and then the just how far you are
determines the volume
right and this is actually
not how the real world works because if
you think about it
the way we talk to each other in real
life
is we have we can talk to each other
and understand each other up to like you
know 20 feet away
just by looking at people’s facial
expressions so you could have a
conversation and understand what
someone’s saying
regardless of distance yet on these
apps they do distance based so like as
you move away from each other you start
not being able to hear each other
and this provide this is actually a
problem for
mapping how the real world works to
the arena of spatial environments
because
um you know if you have a group of like
18 people
the people on the outsides of the map
cannot see
cannot really hear each other because
they’re far away so you have people in
the middle who are able to hear everyone
equally
and the people on the outsides of the
cluster have trouble hearing each other
and this provides a lot of different
problems um
specifically like uh
you know one person in the conversation
can kind of hear everyone
but then when another person who’s
farther away talks they start
not realizing how uh
they start not realizing that the reason
that they can’t hear each other
is not because of like it they they
start wondering if the reason they can
they cannot hear each other is because
of a connection error
or just because of distance and that
provides a lot of confusion
um so how do i solve this problem
well let me just share my screen
so i use a series of can you guys see
this window
are you guys able to see this window
right here yes
yes yes so for kickback what i do is i
have a
series of connected bubbles and if your
guys are if you’re touching someone
else’s bubble you can hear them talk
and if you’re not touching you can
you can hear them very faintly but if
these two groups of clusters right here
and right here
are talking uh they their audio doesn’t
get mixed into each other
so you could have two clusters of groups
who are right next to each other
and their audio won’t bleed into each
other and
so and it forms like a change so for
example if mike
is touching mary but let’s say mario
wasn’t touching susan
everyone in the group can hear it so you
know the algorithm
uh tests like goes to each thing and
connects the bubbles
so you can hear everyone in the group
equally
and this solves major problems not only
that um
you know i’m i’m focusing on
doing it on mobile first because i’ve
noticed a lot of these inter
companies that are doing these apps are
not thinking about the mobile feature of
their app and they’re creating a lot of
features
where and interactions that just won’t
transfer over well to mobile so it’s
easier to go from mobile to desktop
thing to go from desktop to mobile
um for example uh there’s another app
called
gap uh gather town
or something like that that has that
problem of not being able to work on
mobile interfaces
um so would you guys like to uh test it
out
all right let’s sure on
hopefully doesn’t do the crash classic
uh crash when i demo it
uh i’ve tried it before and it works in
groups so
we’ll see stop share
all right so if everyone goes oh wait
i have to send it to everyone there we
go so those are the links and you get
some download right now
and then we’ll be in room one and then
uh when you join the room just be sure
to mute your zoom audio
uh silly question
i’m on a desktop at the moment how do i
get that url
to my phone oh
okay um that is a great question
you can let me just uh do it
we could we could post it to the uh the
dj space
and then we could get the urls off jay
space on yeah
we’ll go on the phone though wouldn’t we
i can also
uh just link my put it on make a tweet
and then you guys can uh just go to me
on
uh on twitter on twitter
okay let’s see so my twitter
is
there we go
i’m going to be obnoxious and say the
answer to that question is have a mac
and an iphone so you can copy on one and
paste on the other
yeah yeah that’d be obnoxious yeah
you could facebook message it to
yourself or you could email it you could
log into zoom again
we could all log into a burner email
account and leave a draft
it’s updated on the main site on
the widget bar on the right
the twitter thing appears to have worked
any of you guys able to download it so
far
uh are you in room one
ah there we go okay i’m gonna mute
myself so the audio doesn’t go and bleed
over
i’ll see you now uh just hang on before
you go it’s just told me
i’m in check my inbox on my mobile
[Music]
and what does that mean
check your inbox in the mobile that’s
what it says
in the app yep
um
i don’t know i don’t use android but
it was working
[Music]
i see dave
possibly means it sent me an email which
isn’t on my mobile
um
and indeed that’s exactly what it’s done
i sent you an email
it sent me an email but that’s on that’s
on the desktop it’s not on my mobile at
all
ah so maybe you’re gonna have to uh send
myself an email
send yourself an email yeah
sorry about this test uh um i wish i
would have had this
investigative android joke but
testing is good this is how you find
stuff out
this is exactly why i wanted us to get
together and do things like this
and jay can i tell you this is or this
has been absolutely worth getting up at
4am
thank you uh let’s see anyone else have
uh
having that same problem let’s see
jan rachel hey
i am hidden getting started
i’m on an iphone and when i
followed through to the links that were
supposed to take me
there it says switch to an android
device to accept this invitation
oh you pressed the i sent two links so
one of them is an iphone and one of them
as an android
uh you see two links there i’m gonna
have to go back i was finding it on your
twitter
yeah so in the twitter there’s uh one
big link and then one
tiny link
okay got it
at this point i might be about
two-thirds of the way through the
process i can say already it’s
way too many steps and it’s making way
too many assumptions
about my my platform because now i’m
being asked to decide
which one of my google accounts i want
to use i don’t want to use any of them
yeah this is the only way to test on
android without releasing to the market
uh okay that’s this uh android problem
uh but yeah i don’t want to do public
release yet
so i’m only doing a private beta oh i
see
from the apple side it seems to have
just kind of linked to
to my apple account maybe yeah
so i’ll see you guys in the app real
quick just so i can uh give the people
in a tour real quick
i’m sharing it on my screen if anybody
wants to kind of
vicariously follow along
i’d like to try the real thing because
the the problem that you’re solving is
exactly the problem that i have seen
with many of this class of app which i
think is you know
a brilliant solution to the challenge
that we’ve got
for social interactions
zoom is not the answer i i said sorry
don j i suppose headphones might help
for this
okay i’m in
yes i can hear you guys
can you hear me
hey tested
see
looks like a point to bail
thank you dave for sharing your screen
[Music]
it’s difficult to tell when there aren’t
lots of people talking at once
uh
okay let’s go back to zoom
what’s really weird is when i turn the
phone on its side
uh
so
hey dave dave camo
yep so should we ask for hydrogen red
support
yeah right right we need to see we need
to have multiple
hey everyone
[Music]
hello welcome back hey everyone i’m back
uh
so that’s the little demo um as you can
see everything
works um it just needs like more people
to
see like the major benefits but uh
what’d you guys think so far
it was pretty good that it worked we got
in there and now we’re back
certainly
i was gonna say this this absolutely
fixes a problem i’ve observed with
other systems of this class i i moved
away from
the main group and they were still
louder than i would have expected
yeah but i had nobody else i was moving
towards so
i don’t know whether that’s real or not
but that question of how big is the
bubble and what happens when you move up
to
to a group that’s really important and
what i’ve observed socially
um for instance with spatial chat people
coming to the system is that two people
will break away
go over to uh one side of the the field
somebody else will wander up the people
will move into a triangle
you get a fourth person come up they’ll
move into a square and they do exactly
the same thing that people will do at a
cocktail party
so the paradigm actually works really
well but then i saw as
as the cluster got big enough you
couldn’t hear people who were on the
other side and so this solves that
problem
exactly exactly no that’s exactly right
and so
um i’ll just give you guys like a little
behind the scenes
on how i plan out the app and basically
how i do my research because i want to
you know add value
in addition to just you know showing off
my
demo um so
here is my process for how i
collect user feedback and process it
so i use a mirror to
so first i i posted on uh
i posted on reddit um so i i got a whole
bunch of different
whole bunch of people responding on
reddit and then what i did was
i um you can just type in after any
reddit post
dot rss and it will
generate an rss feed uh so i was able so
a whole bunch of people commented and i
responded to everyone on the comment
that’s actually how i
found this conference and so i took all
of their feedback
and i you know put it into
different categories mentioning
competitors responses questions feedback
feature requests anything that talks
about different markets that this
you know could address um and then i
just have this unsorted pile and i sort
all of it
and then um then when i but the re the
way i got it into this was i
did a dot rss after the reddit post
i was able to export it to a csv
file by using some like rss to csv
vconverter
and a csv file is just basically an
excel file
and then so i was able to export all of
the comments into
this this has a feature where you can
export csvs
and then what i did was this was these
are all of the different
like areas of the app that i’m trying to
develop out
uh all of the specific features that i
organized into everything so
i have chat profiles a map you know a
website
safety and privacy being able to block
users for example
game games i could play in the room like
tag or hide and go seek
and stuff like that and then what i do
is i took all of those features and
i put it into the four
what’s it called i organized them into
this venn diagram where i looked at
what are the business features education
features game features and party
features
so a party feature might be like ar
filters
but that kind of fits into games too you
know not very useful for education and
business
uh for education and business people
want a
whiteboard you know so i put whiteboard
there
um and and so on
and then so what i do is i looked at all
of the overlapping
features that people were asking for
from these four commun
communities and i this is how i decide
what to focus on first
so for example people want to be able to
kick movers move people around so if
you’re a teacher maybe you could just
drag people around and move them on the
map to organize the students for example
or obviously everyone commented on this
aim camera the face
is very basic thing that just needs to
be done
and then what i do is i take all these
features
and i put them into this bang for your
buck
analysis the cost versus value to create
and then and then so aim camera at face
very easy to fix that’s going to be one
of the first things show names on users
very easy to create adds a ton of value
right
uh more expensive features in the future
i want a global currency but i’ll get
into that in a bit
and then then i kind of do this cost
benefit analysis
which is kind of like another thing uh
high effort low reward
low effort high reward and then i bring
it
i break that up down into the quarters
so based off of that
i can break down the feature sets into
my development cycles that i want to
build it out in
and then i kind of based on that we’ll
create like a little wireframe to go
along with that
and then i kind of uh
refine that to just only a few features
and these are the ones that i have to
really focus on
uh being able to shout uh
you know show names on map desktop audio
versions etc
and um then this is what i hand off to a
developer based off those specs
um looking at the
competition um i’ve been kind of
collecting every single player
in this space right now and this is my
list so far
i’ll be sharing one um if you guys dm me
on twitter
i will share it with you um
but this is a list of all of the
competitors
in this space and i’m constantly adding
it because they’re
constantly popping up daily um
i actually have what’s what’s the one
that we’re
we were using wander wanders on here you
know i found out about them
there’s a whole bunch of other ones and
i
kind of you know add the amount raised
and
add a whole bunch of different
categories of like do these spatial
audio
what are they used for are they used for
conferences networking
et cetera water cooler for work
meetings and i
i’m just trying to map out the entire
market uh in high detail
and there’s different pros and cons to
all these apps one of my favorites
competitors is actually this one called
toucan
and they’re really cool i really like
them
they’re very similar to mine they have a
different philosophy
of using bubbles so like kind of like
basically tables
and you can just jump into them i
thought that’s interesting
uh do i think it’s a better solution not
really because you don’t have freedom of
movement
so for example um toucan would never be
able to enter into the game space
because you have no movement um
and so by allowing for movement in the
app
it kind of lets you attack different
vectors you know
of of uh how you could
of of use cases you know this could be
used as a game
because i’m building it in unity it
could be used as
um a party i could build out a full
featured
um education platform so
yeah there’s a lot of things in the work
and
that’s pretty much my presentation so
i’ll just uh
open it up to questions
yeah how are you focusing on scalability
and i’ll ask that because one of the
things i’ve observed
for instance with online town is that
when we put i don’t know 100 people
into a space it became like working in
sludge
yes yes yes so that’s just working with
webrtc or you know they have different
uh
apis or uh how you handle the audio in
the rooms
that’s that’s going to be a natural
limitation of
all everyone in this space just because
yeah we’re always going to try and push
the limits for their events to try and
get
everyone in the event into these rooms
and
scaling that is just a very iterative
process you start off with 10
you move to 20 you move to 50
and each step has its new
amount of challenges and hurdles
is there a practical limit to the number
of people you could have
in a space like what are the
dependencies
so um there’s
it so to get to they’ll understand the
limitations you have to understand the
core technologies
which are there’s video chat the video
chat aspect
i mean as far as like the movement and
just recording people’s positions
we’ve all heard of mmos which are mass
multiplayer online
and those can already have
a bajillion people so that’s not an
issue um oh and david i see you left the
question i’ll definitely get to that
um that question after this one um
but then we have to look at technologies
like
the video so if you’ve noticed on zoom
you will never see more than like 20
people at a time
you know how they have like that thing
where you flip through there’s like
arrows and then you have to flip through
the next page the next page next page
that’s not an accident that’s a
limitation of their technology actually
of being able to show so many data
streams for video
at one time and that’s a huge
problem in this space because uh and
different apps handle it differently so
for example
gathered uptown they
allow like uh little clusters of people
to show up together
but there’s only so many people who can
be bunched up at one time
so we’ll have a limitation of how many
videos you could see at one
at the same time it also matters how big
is each video
is each video in full hd that’s a lot of
data to stream to everyone at the same
time there’s also other limitations of
peer-to-peer
or sending it to a server and then
broadcasting it
peer-to-peer is cheaper because it goes
i’m streaming data directly to someone
and they’re streaming it to me but once
you get to big groups
keeping up those connections so there’s
a lot of different strategies people are
implementing
in these apps um but the one trend that
i’ll
tell you is for video you will never see
more than
20 people at a time in any of these apps
at the moment
um and as far as there’s apps like high
fidelity to get to david’s question you
ask me
do you have any plans to integrate
interactive maps like high fidelity so
uh
kind of segwaying to high fidelity they
use audio only right now
probably because of those limitations of
video um
and i think that’s good like
that’s a great way to prototype it but i
think people want video
and so i think
there’s a place in the middle which you
know
i’m currently working on which is uh how
do you
kind of offer both solutions in a way
that looks like a one cohesive product
uh do i have plans to integrate
interactive maps like high fidelity
uh yes i i do um
this is like a beam right so people
float around and it feels very natural
and human-like so
um in every game you can interact with
the environment
and keeping it fun i think it’s
essential to create experiences where
you can’t
interact with the environment or also
interact with other players
i want to transfer every offline real
world
interaction like what does it look like
to whisper to someone
uh what does it look like to shout at
someone in real life
how do you grab someone like you can in
real life and say hey you know come with
me i want to introduce you to someone
how do you do that you know in a way
that just feels effortless
and people just can automatically
intuitively use
and i think the real winner in the space
is going to be who can translate
all of those offline you know
interactions
into something that feels intuitive like
the real world
it’s not going to be who makes the big
the most conference features and stuff
like that because at the end of the day
like
uh in real life if you think about what
a conference is it’s just a big building
with some like signs of telling you
where to congregate
and giving the ability for people to
like have a stage
and it’s really no more complicated than
that there’s also the invites and stuff
like that
but you know um like uh
what’s what’s the like the project
before me you know they’re handling
stuff like that
so um essentially
it’s all about just translating the real
life ux into
the virtual world um
john says i think if i had to choose
between live video and the audio
paradigm and kickback i would do
without the video but the experience
shows that an avatar picture i’m not
importing his name yeah so that’s kind
of the direction that i’ve
decided to head into because audio can
just support much bigger rooms than
video at the moment and video will soon
scale
but it just takes a lot of work on the
back end to be very creative
to scale up the video after
any other questions
so with wonder me the screen share
aspect
is really impressive
in that it can replicate a academic
poster session
where you have the different groups
sharing
different screens do you have any plans
to go in that direction
yeah screen sharing is uh definitely
like one of the things that everyone
asks for
um and i think while a lot of these
other companies focus on that
that’s fine like you know they’re gonna
be making some more immediate revenue
as far as being able to offer those but
um
i think a lot of times these companies
are going to get too far
stuck going down a path of just
trying to get into the conference space
uh which it’s it’s a good space
but it only solves one tiny little
corner of this problem
um and there’s
just more like focusing on the bubbles
for example is like my first
area of focus because it feels intuitive
and i want to just be the most intuitive
platform at the moment
and just have be able to attack multiple
segments is kind of what i’m trying to
know for at the moment
do you think this would translate into a
vr
headset where it could be sort of a
lightweight version of our space or
one of those vr chat
yeah so vr chat is for those who don’t
know is a
highly highly successful vr program
where essentially you just
have an avatar and people run around
just in these crazy avatars anonymously
and just like start talking to each
other and
uh and and yeah so
this is kind of like the bird’s eye view
of that you know you could just imagine
vr chat is first person and then this is
more of the bird’s eye
in the future definitely transitioning
to vr is going to be important for this
platform
um but i think right now
vr is not accessible and yet we think we
see how
popular an open world environment
it’s basically a communication mmo uh vr
chat is so
why not just bring that to the phone uh
and have
a mmo vr chat but just
on any device so i think having it being
accessible will generate a huge user
base
is there any jns is there any way to
close off a conversation
um if you want to make a private chat
yeah so that’s also another thing so i
want to
in real life what does that look like
well it looks like
you know if someone walks up to you in
real life and like
you don’t want to talk to them you know
they won’t make eye contact with you
because if you make eye contact with
someone that’s inviting them into the
conversation
so that kind of happens naturally uh in
my app
you just won’t be able to intersect
bubbles it’ll kind of like
block you so people can close it off
so that there’s a lot i can do with this
as far as uh
recreating how these things work it’ll
just be like a button i’ll just say
close make this conversation private for
everyone in this group
and uh and yeah i i think
that’s kind of what we’re missing right
now is
the ability for things to feel real
online like right now if someone wanted
to just break away
and just tap someone on the shoulder in
this zoo and be like hey let’s talk to
the side you know
um you know this donji guy he’s boring
as like
you know i i’d rather talk to you about
something else
you know you can’t just pull someone out
of this and just start talking to them
uh and i think that’s what we’re all
kind of looking for
is being able to if you go to a
networking event
you know it’s very hard to network if
you can’t just have one-on-one
conversations so easily
what do you have to what is that what
are the procedures for it in
you know a thing like this you have to
message someone and say you know hey i’d
like to have a one-on-one oh what time
you know that takes a lot of time to set
up a one-on-one conversation versus real
life you just tap someone on the
shoulder and say hey i want to talk
you can you talk right now and they’re
like yeah and you just pull them aside
and you’re talking
you know so a lot of it is
can be done with breakout rooms or
scheduling
but as we know in real life if you had
to schedule
everything at a conference in order to
have a one-on-one conversation
imagine how few one-on-one conversations
you’d have
you know it would be kind of crazy to
schedule every single one-on-one
conversation before you had it at a
conference
uh in the real world i think you’ve hit
it right there
the the thing that i wanted to solve for
worldcon and
and never really got to do we did it
with discord
we used discord and we sort of mapped
map the socialization onto that which
you can’t do in zoom
and you certainly can’t do easily in in
breakout rooms in zoom
is how you reconstruct the concept of
the corridor conversation
the serendipitous meeting that you have
with people
that makes live convention going so
important that’s why you would travel
halfway around the world because you
know you’re going to have those
conversations yeah what are yours
well i i was involved with running the
world science fiction convention this
year
yeah but that wasn’t in wellington and
we had to invent a very large amount of
stuff very very quickly because it was
um no history to go on i mean we were
like we’re virtualizing right on pretty
much on day one of everybody going oh
yeah covet is a thing
yeah yeah and and that was sort of
completely unexpected whereas you know
now even six months down i can i can see
that
um rachel livermore with what she was
doing you know like that couple of
months
extra um meant she had choices that we
didn’t have
back in in february but so what i’m
seeing
like everything you’re saying to me this
is a piece of encouragement
is saying um the paradigm that you’re
putting together
maps against the social interaction
model that
i believe and have observed is required
to make virtualization of conventions
actually work and it’s replacing the
automatic human contact that we get when
you just walk out of a room and talk to
somebody
yeah so if it manages if it manages the
concept of speed dating if it manages
the
can i tap you on the shoulder we need to
have a private conversation
okay if it manages the i’d like to
settle up and break into the
conversation naturally at an appropriate
time
you know like somebody could do here now
they could join in on this conversation
except nobody is
the problem with with this sort of
environment is you really can have only
one conversation
at a time yes exactly
exactly that’s my bid and david asks uh
can groups merge
and yeah groups converge all you have to
do is uh
it’s actually funny if you have two
groups of like let’s say three here and
three here
and then one person is like kind of goes
in between the groups and connects them
for a second
it will connect the audio of both groups
so
merging is actually extremely effortless
in this application that could be a bit
weird yeah it can be weird but the
alternative is to do something like
breakout rooms where everything is
pre-defined on who can talk to who
and then going in and out of
conversations you know
if i wanted to set up a side thing i
rely on the host to make the breakout
rooms to invite me to the factory rooms
and
um so actually and also one thing i’ve
noticed
is there’s an app called here dot me and
here dot fm
and they’re very they’re kind of similar
they’re kind of like a nero
what i wander uh hybrid
and uh you can kind of move around draw
pictures on the canvas add post-it notes
etc
uh and it’s video too but they’ll
actually let you drag other people into
a trash can
and if you drag them into the trash can
it
pops it actually turns off their audio
and camera and shuts them up
which is pretty hilarious because you
could be talking and someone could not
like what you’re saying and drag you in
the trash can and all of a sudden
you can’t talk and uh what is that
why do people why is it so funny and why
is it like such a fun idea because
it adds a sense of chaos um and one
thing i’ve realized from
translating experiences from the real
world into the virtual world is
the things that you might think are bad
that like one person could connect to
groups and also in everyone’s audios
together
it creates chaos but that’s what makes
it fun and if we
see this when it comes to going when
teenagers go out drinking you know or
like uh
you know young adults go out drinking
and go to bars and stuff like
if fights and bars weren’t a thing
a lot less people would go out and i
know that sounds strange but
you know you people love the gossip the
next day oh my god did you hear like
bobby just got in a
fight with jay like and everyone’s like
oh that was crazy you know
and so the chaos is what makes the
experiences fun so
the more chaos and weird things you can
add to your app
actually make it feel more real is what
i found
so have you worked any testing with
music
to kind of do to mimic a cocktail party
where you can have a couple musicians
playing and then other people be able to
listen
or break off for private conversation
um as far as adding music to the runes
no but i i planned on it
i think that would be uh definitely fun
i know i spoke to someone
who was using high fidelity and what
they did was just
they put on their ipad or something and
just
got a little speaker and then just
started playing music from that
and then that was the music for the room
i’ve i’ve done that i had experience
with that where we had a happy hour with
like
60 or 70 people and when we tested it
and it was just me
and the other guy the the music worked
really well but then when there was so
many people in there
it that was a different a different ball
game
yeah so perhaps i would make the music
only appear when you’re not in a
conversation so if you’re just single
floating you know i could make a rule
for that
spatial chat lets you uh embed
a playing uh zoom so they’re playing uh
youtube clip
and we found that you could you know
spatial chat has a
quite big playing space so you could
open a playing video over on one side it
became like the virtual dance floor
so you know you’re running bg’s or
something if people wanted that in the
background they could sidle
up to it and you know provided you have
um sort of a logarithmic approach curve
or something like that you could decide
how close you want to be without the the
audio being there on or not there
so the virtual dance floor was a really
cool thing that we discovered we could
do
yeah that was fun but the thing i really
don’t like about
the way they implemented it is there’s
an invisible
they don’t actually reflect what you can
hear and what you can’t visually
so you’re just guessing when you’re
looking at the interface for how
close you’d have to be to hear the music
and that’s very confusing
um but i do like the virtual dance floor
jan asks people talk about zoom fatigue
what do you think
a typical duration in your app would be
um
so for mobile it’s considerably less
than
uh desktop because you have to hold the
phone um
so i’m starting off with mobile but
ultimately desktop’s gonna be mainly
where people are using this just because
you don’t have to hold it so um i’m all
about accessibility though
um and one of the things that’s really
huge i don’t know if you guys heard but
join clubhouse as audio platform they
just raised 10 million dollars from
andreessen horowitz at like 100 million
valuation and
they are banking on the ipod
i airpod generation so people have their
airpods in and like you know the idea is
just
the reason why you want to be on mobile
is because uh
the order is mobile video is the least
amount of time you can spend on the
phone
desktop video you can spend a little
more
mobile audio only you can spend the most
amount of time on because you can just
pop in your air pods move around you
don’t have to look at the screen put the
phone in your pocket
and you can have like an hour long
conversation just like a phone call
and then when you need to go back into
the app you know you can move around and
talk to another person and
walk up to them and start talking put
the phone back in your pocket
and so there’s a it’s kind of weird so
it’s like
mobile is at this mobile by itself
is uh takes
not that much it’s a very hard it the
allowance time people spend
is very little mobile with air pods you
have a long time you can talk
so um it’s kind of uh
choosing which platform you know you
have to kind of think about
how you want people to use it um so
i think being on all platforms is pretty
essential
maybe we could make this the last
question
how do you intend to monetize this
i don’t intend to monetize it so um
basically being more of like a discord
or zoom
and uh having free audio rooms and paid
video rooms
um and letting people just kind of
use it as a tool to begin with um
but i have uh other plans
um like uh i
this is not just a normal platform it’s
a
it’s essentially a gaming platform plus
a communication platform
and so who do i
really idolize in this space i don’t
know if you guys have heard of roblox
you just heard of roblox so roblox is a
gaming platform
and it is currently
one of the biggest gaming markets out
there uh about
half of every kid in the united states
has roblox downloaded on their ipad
and iphone or and all the platforms uh
it’s on every single platform xbox
iphone
android ipad desktop
and what they do is they create a global
currency
along with a
sandbox environment where anyone any kid
out there there’s little
teenagers you know creating games on top
of this platform
and they’re making like a million
dollars a year and they’re only like 14
uh and it’s just because they’re able to
create an experience
and this platform automatically lets
them monetize it through the global
currency
and do little in-app purchases within
each minigame
and so if you go on to roblox you can
just see like
um this is someone who’s
this is uh you can just create an
experience and everyone else can just
use it
and it lets them monetize that
experience so it’s more of like an
operating system if you think about it
and i think that’s kind of where the
future of the space is
is you know i want to create a
communication operating system
and allow anyone to create experiences
on top of it
and that’s actually why i’m focusing on
translating the core
elements of human communication and
trend making it virtual
and if anyone else wants to create this
experience because i know everyone has
like ideas of thinking ooh
i could build this with this platform
you know i don’t want you to have to go
and go through all the trouble i did
again from scratch i want you to just
focus on building your experience
so i’m going to create the core engine
of communication
and then let other people build
experiences with my platforms they don’t
have to start
reinvent the wheel and then let them
monetize it uh and then just take a
you know thirty percent uh thing like
roblox does
okay thank you so much yeah
good great avenue thank you
and if anyone wants to follow me on
twitter it’s uh my twitter’s
at don g kong and i’d love to talk with
any of you guys uh because
i just can’t get enough of this space
and uh i would love to have
one-on-one conversations with you guys
yeah or
or in discussion like on reddit
etc um maybe put your edit username
in your profile here
okay uh do people need your break or
should
you just have a wrap-up
um
anyone okay
uh did anybody see the mars
presentation or have anything to discuss
about that
just no
okay um i’m gonna just share the screen
oh you can hear me right yeah
show okay screen
okay uh this is attendify
uh which seemed to work fine
and there wasn’t complaints about it
so you had the
schedule for each day
then you have the speaker embedded zoom
a live chat on the side
which as a volunteer we i keep track of
the
actual zoom session and the live chat
here
and the youtube streaming so
that’s something we need some sort of
integration
um there’s active calls
uh basic convention info
and he said but wonder me but it wasn’t
used
pages for the speakers which the
speakers could add themselves
we had one sponsor
and your basic exhibitors
and donation link
um
yeah this basically worked
pretty good um and it also was
two thousand dollars for unlimited users
so they end up with i said
five thousand live at least
okay um
just overview of this site
basic tool of course was google sorry
could i just ask a quick question about
attendify before you move on
um are were the videos available
afterwards to watch on demand
ask the exact same question through
another youtube channel
for society uh
yeah they just
this will be around for a year they paid
for your
license and
i don’t think it actually hosts the
recorded video
on the platform so
youtube channel has everything
uh yeah that’s one thing i’m sad about
that this sort of thing just disappears
and he’s looking for a way of archiving
this
um
okay uh there’s a program
called linker gogo which i’m a major fan
of
let me just log in
this is bookmarks on steroids
of
you can actually add like 32 k
of notes to each of these
um you could make aliases just
what you can do is great and as i’m
looking for people
to contact conventions
there’s a bookmarklet
and this way you can add comments
hierarchical
tags freeform tags
um
it’s something worth checking out and
it’s a shame this program never
really caught on
okay um
has anybody seen streak crm
felt like at a soccer game when someone
runs onto the field
gross um customer
relationship management and this i was
using hubspot
but this one is also free if it’s one
person
and it also allows for unlimited email
tracking so you could see when somebody
opens your email
and makes sure your message gets through
and you know as i was contacting
potential
speakers there’s a sales pipeline you
could see
but i just use it for did they reply did
they commit
um well
it’s based on wordpress
and do people know about bitnami
it lets you run wordpress on your
desktop
so you can try stuff and totally screw
things up and crash
and you don’t have to worry because you
could just
you know open up a saved version
so that’s really good when i was
learning
and seeing what stuff just
trashed the system
um so buddy boss platform
is the free component that gives
all of the groups and the accounts and
forums
uh when you go to login instead of the
normal wordpress login
theme by login makes it match
and bp redirect
when you log in it sends you to a
specific page
and that could be different depending on
the user
uh countdown builder you saw the
countdown clock
um ayers kit
lets you hide or display
blocks of text depending on whether you
are logged in or not
so like
just show you the example
so here you’re logged in now if you
the form saves your user information
so if you’re not logged in i have no way
of knowing
who you were filling out the form
so
um you’re using caldera forms
the add to any share
for sure into facebook
or twitter and
seo press
uh see
that let me say a different picture
easily and a blurb
um wp mail is interesting
the normal wordpress email
i’ve been told is bad so this lets me
use
the google account to send all
communication
from the website and i have a feeling if
this gets successful enough
it’s going to quickly reach google’s
limits
like google isn’t good for mass email so
probably use this plugin to switch to
using
like protonmail
um
let’s see
just so
my plan is to have everybody’s talk with
the embedded
picture and with the transcript
that was just taken from
youtube’s captions
um oh and
this main schedule is from
conference scheduler
uh which is a plug-in
so it’s the only thing i found that
seemed to be decent
wait is this visible to us or just to
you
this will where i was just shown i could
say again we can all see it i’ve been
following along
oh have you yeah yeah i mean this should
be
this you hit main schedule and you come
here
okay yeah and the list of two orders
here are in the overview
js a suggestion that overview of vcc and
the list you’ve got there
is really good if you get a moment could
you annotate
you know just like a half line against
each of those plug-ins
absolutely yeah and possibly with with
the link to it but i’ve seen a couple of
there that i already use and a whole
heap that i don’t
yeah absolutely i’m i just made it last
night
this is all work in progress my
philosophy is was
if i could get 80 percent of the way
there
just do it to at least get something
going
um yeah
yeah send me any suggestions what to do
enabling foreign languages that’s a
major thing
to add and
i’m sort of scared to see how bad this
is for a blind person
you know blind access is something
i really like to enable easily
and if anybody knows of people who work
in the disability access
you know send me info
that might not be as much of a problem
as you think um but a lot of the work
that you’re asking for is actually part
of
themes and theme design so if you pick
the right theme
then accessibility is something that
comes along for the ride and you don’t
have to feel so much pain about it
well because of the buddy press
i’m sort of locked into
themes i don’t know how other themes
would work with the plugin
and i’m actually not using the
uh correct plugin from buddy boss i mean
yeah yeah this is the whole basis
um yeah the platform
so yeah it’s the platform is free but
if you want their theme you have to pay
and if somebody wants if we could get a
few people to come in
it’ll be cheaper
but for now it seems to work
um any comments questions
i have to say jay this is this is uh
this is very very impressive
and very very like i don’t know if it’s
zoom fatigue but the
very meta nature of what we were just
seeing like kicked in at some point and
i was like well wait we’re watching the
virtual convention convention convention
like as you’re building the thing for
the thing for the thing
uh so if we i think we should just give
you a big round of applause
right now yeah and your team
[Music]
jay this does not look like something
that you’ve
just cooked up and i’ve i found out it
is less than 24 hours
since i even found the link to this and
this has been
well worth attending thank you so
i think like i should schedule like in
two weeks like an
hour meeting maybe at like 4 p.m
eastern or i’m not sure i could use
mixed leave
to take a paul for when the meeting is
uh you know just
try out stuff have the live component
as well as the asynchronous discussion
forums
that is actually a whole topic uh that
we didn’t even get into which is the
post
the post convention like what happens
then so your attendees come
things happen what stays around what’s
going to be there
for for yours it’s a it’s going to be a
continual
uh all the data is going to be there
right and uh and then
for follow-up will like i don’t know
what i’m saying
good yeah um
i mean that’s all point
here it’s a forum system that’s not
based on facebook or
discord or anything so at least
we can use it start doing discussions
you know each speaker has a discussion
group
so if any vendor wanted to add to it
that would be great
and then of course we can you know
upload documents we can upload pictures
um the main thing is to
have threaded discussions
and then could mind the good bits and
have just regular pages that might be a
bit more
curated
is there a way to do uh to to send a
follow-up
message in in that system to uh
for for retention for like the people
today to i don’t know if there’s a poll
well like you said maybe maybe that
mixify
is something that you could send
well i mean i have everyone’s email so i
could just do a mass
email i’d probably have to get
some other better mail in this system
and of course you know we can contact
other members right through here
right just thinking like of a like a way
that we could also use to apply
to other to other conventions because
we as you know we have our our
our 3d convention we used we ended up
using mailchimp
and we didn’t really get like like
really
opt-in for the messages so at some point
we have to send out
like we did send a follow-up survey but
i think we need to manage better the
the opt-in nature of the mailing list
and whether people want to get it
that’s a whole other conversation i’ve
started having at work as well
on which is our your main global list
that’s reaching everyone and is it
opt-in is it how is it being curated
how do we drill down smaller
uh more interested people like that
whole management system
of the people attending and how to reach
out
we did a mass mailing after our high
holidays
based on the zoom report of what emails
they used to log
in because we’ve acquired registered
users
so a few people registered with like a
home address but ended up using their
work zoom and so they got a follow-up
email from us to their work
zoom account their work email they were
like oh my god where did you get this
from
so that i think that’s a whole
conversation on
on follow-up and retention and then
customer database management that
zoom in the information that zoom gets
that can give to the meeting organizers
is something that
regular users wouldn’t have any idea
that you have that information like it’s
it’s really great it’s granular you know
you can see all the emails and how long
they were on and which sessions they
went to
and um yeah we we used that to try to
kind of
tie against our our registration list
and
we didn’t really go too deep into it but
um
it’s definitely it’s a good resource but
you’re right like if you use it in the
wrong way in an unexpected fashion
people could be confused
okay um you guys won’t just scroll today
i know dave you want to go to i want to
check out your wonder and your little
high fidelity rooms
you know those are yeah i mean i did
hardly anything
on it um the high fidelity
i had an idea of making links to
sort of a whiteboard separate program
but didn’t get to that
you need you need dave heiser to be in a
room with you at the time and then
volunteer to do it and then he’ll
magically make things happen right but
yeah the wonder me
seems to be really interesting
well that’s cool
well thank you okay jay thank you so
much this has just been amazing i feel
like i learned
so much today oh great thank you thank
you everybody who presented and
shared their ideas
yeah hopefully we can just keep this
community
going get more people in and save a lot
of pain
we all go to one of those rooms like the
high fidelity or the wander one
oh one go to one do without me
we could go to the high fidelity one
first because i could
dave and i could probably give a give a
quick
tell people quickly how to move around
in there we use that for our
uh for our convention yeah let’s go to
hype fidelity or i mean jay do you wanna
should we
can we go to the 3d room that’s more fun
yeah that would be better yes
yeah it’s there wait which one is that
can you just put it in the
well that’s in the chat
i pasted one in but let’s go with dave’s
yeah just pasted it into the chat
so i think the way to do it is you you
would click on it
and then before moving before before
doing your audio
and speaker setup you want to log out of
zoom
because it’ll kind of cross over so so
click so that the link is in your
browser and ready to go and then log out
of this meeting
when you say log out you mean disconnect
from yeah yeah you could actually like
yeah you can stop the video i think but
i think we’re close
wait why is it a 3d um why is it called
3d
uh this is left over from uh in august
we had a
national stereoscopic association
meeting and so we
we flushed the room the high fidelity
room out
a bit more than what we have for the
virtual convention convention one
so uh so there’s a bit more kind of to
see
in this room ah is there like an editor
that they have
no no there’s a json
file that you can set up that where you
can set up hot links and you can set up
a map
underneath
how does the json file work how is it is
it hard to use you
you sorry go ahead
go ahead jd also if that that’s why you
didn’t add any links you have to like
manually type in and figure out
x y and it was like
i i can’t even like use a
adobe illustrator file to translate it’s
just oh
you’re only one man jay
you only have ten fingers in um well
look i can yeah i can share my screen
and i can show you what um
yeah well actually why don’t i do that
why don’t i show you i can give an
overview of
of hyphen of what we did
audio five percent of the attention
95 percent of the problems
okay okay
so the the the first issue you run into
is
uh when you’re in when you’re in zoom
you’re using your microphone and then
you you come over to here and if you’re
not muted in zoom then the
things feedback so you want to choose
the mic input that’s the correct
uh for you to talk
and then you choose the headphone and
you can test with the the talking and
the
sound and you just click next you can
choose a put a name there you can put a
picture there
and choose a circle that’s around you uh
and then you have this
this room which is basically a um
there’s a jpeg
underneath it so there’s a big jpeg that
that dave heiser fleshed out and then
picture that as just like the lowest
level and then above that
there’s that’s where the json file comes
in and the json file
is defining coordinates where like xy
coordinates
uh where you can it makes them clickable
so like notice that like if i hover here
uh it’s it’s made an xy coordinate for
the registration table
and so we tried to make that you you
come in here you go right to the
registration desk
which is the the page on our website
uh so when you’re moving around here you
have to you do have to make sure that
you’re not
clicking on um on links or they’ll open
up now that’s really just
that’s kind of the icing on the cake
really because that’s not part of
the what the basic high fidelity is all
about
um what what’s happening now is that
these people
uh are here so we’ve got dave
and we’ve got uh rachel so i can click
on there
i can mute her for everyone just to be
kind of me
um but she can unmute uh
you can you can use your right mouse
click to rotate which sort of makes you
listen like closer to somebody so you
can kind of if you want to talk you can
kind of
like it’s like i’m facing dave now um
i’m facing rachel um you can
use your mouse you can use the right and
left arrows
this works on the iphone as well it
works on the quest
actually if you feel like doing it but
it’s not in vr
um and then you chat
uh dave did you was there anything
i missed was there was there anything
that i that i missed in my quick
overview of
i’m having a hard time understanding i
think there’s too many inputs
oh okay hang on
okay but i think that’s that’s it in a
nutshell i mean
do you should we just pop into the room
everyone ready to
kick out of the zoom and go into the
high fidelity
yep all right let’s do that
uh but don’t close the this thing just
so everyone can like
have that link in case they didn’t click
on it yet oh yeah if so then you want to
like
you want to mute and yeah i guess just
mute or
audio yeah i actually i think you have
to change your audio source
in zoom maybe
maybe it works both across maybe
so
what else is weird is if when you move
your screen your avatar between
other people and like just try and
squeeze through a gap
it is so bizarre
oh hang on was i muted or not used
yeah i’ve got the cleaner here we we
have this
sort of korean cleaner who turns up
every two weeks and we don’t know how to
tell them don’t keep coming
because they don’t speak english
oh
i’m sorry
you