Tech Talk Follow Up

[brado426]

The well-earned award to Brad O. for creating Return and Report must be noted here. Especially given the long history of that project, I find a particular symbol therein about the Church being open to ideas from this community.

I must echo this as well! Congrats Brad! And thank you for your hard work and persistence that have gotten all of us this far. We will try to carry the work forward from here as a community partnering with Church developers.

I say that because I know your life just recently got pretty busy! ]

Thanks guys. I hope you guys enjoyed my "mini-general conference" with me reading every word from a cue card.

Yes, mkmurray is right.... My wife and I had our first baby recently and my free time to "nerd it up" has been significantly decreased. It is well worth it though! Being a parent is an awesome thing!

I will definitely check out the Wiki when I get a chance but my involvement will unfortunately be minimal. If you guys have any specific questions about the work I have done on ReturnAndReport.org, feel free to ask. I think the best way to familiarize one's self with every aspect of it is to sign up for an account and use the system.

Thanks again to Joel and everyone who supported this project. I do feel great satisfaction in the role I have been able to play (so far) in the Church's newly established tech community.

By the way, I think Tech Talk was awesome. I like that it didn't drag on too long. I think it was a perfect way for the Church to officially begin allowing Church members to assist with projects. Most of the question/answers were things that I already knew from browsing these forums, but I'm sure others benefited from them.

For the next tech talk, I'd like to see the ability for attendees to collaborate and hold discussions with each other. I was disappointed that the webinar was simply a "submit question" interface and didn't allow me to see the other attendees of "Tech Talk" or communicate with them in any way. Hopefully next time some more interaction will be available.

For the first online Tech Talk, I think everything was pretty much flawless though.

Brad O.

[champted]

Thankx very much for doing the Tech Talk(s). I am looking forward to viewing last night's program and those in the future.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to follow the Tech Talk as it happened. My Windows 98 / Windows Media Player 9 setup wouldn't connect to it at all. My PCLinuxOS / Firefox / mplayer setup connected, but it was too choppy to get any useful information out of, and would disconnect periodically. After the fourth time, I gave up.

I have a 384 kB Internet connection. I thought that would be enough bandwidth for the Tech Talk, but I guess not.

Q 1. Would it be possible to have an audio-only stream for low- or moderate-bandwidth users next time?

Q 2. If I attempt to view the archived Tech Talk when it comes out, will it be a stream only, or will it be available in some downloadable form that I can play locally, presumably without the problems with streaming? (Needless to say, I prefer the latter. I can download big files overnight, and play them off-line later.)

Thank you.

[johnshaw]

I was able to view the streaming just fine, a major kudos to CHQ for this event. I look forward to many good things to come.

[WelchTC]

I was excited to hear about the SVN repository. I've created my LDS Account but still cannot access the repository. I'm hoping there's just some lag between the account creation process and being able to sign in. Is anyone else able to access the repository?

The SVN system is in place but we have yet to put any projects in it. That will change within the next few days. Look for some exciting announcements on the forum!

Tom

[WelchTC]

In case it's helpful, I did want to mention some things which I thought worked better at the live tech talk in the Bay Area some months back. I realize an online meeting will never be quite the same as an in-person one. But tonight's seemed a little rushed--I was very surprised when it ended after only 40 minutes. I would have enjoyed more detail in Joel's presentation, presentations from others, and more time for questions at the end.

We had scheduled 1 hour of time and we learned a lot about doing a virtual tech talk. I'll post our official findings later. However two things of note:

1. It is difficult for someone untrained to stair into a camera for 1 hour and talk. So we may need to have multiple presenters if we were to stretch the length.

2. Although we had a bunch of questions queued up for Joel, it was very difficult during the event to get new questions to Joel. Therefore we will need to refine the Q&A process better.

Thanks everyone for attending!

Tom

[WelchTC]

For the first online Tech Talk, I think everything was pretty much flawless though.

Good thing you weren't here "behind the scenes". We had a few technical glitches.

Tom

[aebrown]

Although we had a bunch of questions queued up for Joel, it was very difficult during the event to get new questions to Joel. Therefore we will need to refine the Q&A process better.

I really enjoyed the Q&A. I thought Joel did a great job of answering questions clearly and concisely.

For future tech talks, there is definitely some room for improvement. It was obvious that some questions were queued up -- you even had some images ready to show as part of the responses. And yet on the other hand, it seemed odd that several questions were repeated -- that showed that either those questions were not prepared ahead of time, or the preparation was inadequate.

There were many questions that were posted on this forum ahead of time that in my opinion were entirely appropriate, and yet did not get addressed. I was disappointed that the Q&A segment was so short, and it seems that with improved preparation, there could have been many more questions answered, while still staying within the one hour time limit. I can see how it is quite challenging to handle questions posed in real time; personally I wouldn't mind if most if not all the questions came in advance.

But all in all, it was definitely a success, and it's probably good to keep the goals for the first one modest so that we can improve and do even better with the next one. Speaking of that, is there any thought of the schedule for the next one? Will these be 2, 3, 4 times a year?

[Daniel-p40]

What is the SVN address?

[aebrown]

One technical glitch that was a bit distracting, and would be worth fixing for next time:

I kept both the video stream and the webinar screens open. The webinar screen showed the presentation; the video stream switched between the presentation and showing Joel talking. The webinar display of the presentation was much clearer than the video (an obvious result, given the technologies used). Much of the smaller text on the video was quite unreadable, whereas the same text on the webinar was crystal clear.

Unfortunately, the display of the presentation on the webinar screen was significantly behind the video stream. The change of slides on the video stream seemed to occur at the right times, but the webinar presentation was several seconds behind. In some cases Joel was done talking about a point before the slide even appeared on the webinar screen.

I'm not sure of the reasons for the delay -- it may just be the latency inherent in the GotoWebinar system -- but if anything can be done to have the webinar presentation keep up better, that would be helpful.

[mkmurray]

What is the SVN address?

https://tech.lds.org/svn