What we learned from hybrid GUADEC in 2024

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

Hello,

We just completed the 2024 edition of GUADEC which was probably the most distributed GNOME conference that we’ve ever done. I’m interested in everyone’s thoughts on what went well and what we have learned from this edition.

At some point soon the GUADEC team will be asking for feedback on the conference via a survey. This is an additional public discussion, not the official survey.

Some “firsts” that I saw this year:

• A talk with two presenters on stage in Berlin and two presenters on stage in Denver (“State of the Shell”)
• A talk with presenters in 3 different places (“You’re always breaking GNOME”)
• A talk recorded live on stage in Berlin then played back in Denver (the Design team talk… or maybe that one was live… I’m not sure)
• The Pants of Thanks being presented by Frederico while at home in Mexico
• the first hybrid AGM with board members in 3 different countries

I’m going to make a separate post with my thoughts on what went well, but overall we definitely tried some new things this year, which is very good in itself. I’m interested in your thoughts below.

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

Here’s some thoughts from me.

1. We had very little intercontinental travel - I think only 7 folks crossed the Atlantic from Europe, and a few more from India. I’ve read that the biggest greenhouse gas emissions from GNOME are due to intercontinental travel, so this is quite an achievement. (That said, there aren’t really low-carbon travel options within America, and America is huge, so we can’t describe this as a “green” edition of the conference).

2. Participants who are giving remote talks need high quality microphones. Speech through laptop microphone sounds OK when you listen back through laptop speakers. The same audio can be almost unintelligible when played through a venue’s sound system in a large room. We had a few talks where the folk in Denver just couldn’t make it what the speaker was saying. We need a solution for this – perhaps we send a 50€ USB podcast microphone to each remote speaker who needs one.

3. The venue in Denver was excellent for a hybrid event. I can’t think of anything worse than watching pre-recorded talks from a chair in a windowless university lecture theatre. The Denver venue had daylight, varied seating, tables for groups to gather, and lots of space to move around, so it was possible to watch recorded talks while still having a local atmosphere as well. Let’s have more venues like this.

[pwithnall (Philip Withnall)]

Thanks for bringing this up Sam!

Here’s my thoughts, as someone who was at the mini-GUADEC in Berlin. We had various talks given locally-only; various talks given locally in Berlin, recorded and then sent to Denver; and a few talks/contributions where people in Berlin joined presenters in Denver over BBB.

I gave two talks, which I was told to pre-record and send the recordings to Denver. The instructions about pre-recording them came quite late (while I was travelling), and seemed a bit confused about pre-recording a few days in advance vs (what I thought had been agreed, which was to) pre-record when giving the talk live in Berlin (i.e. a few hours in advance). As a result I probably had inaudible laptop-microphone audio. Sorry. We had a proper recording setup (camera, wireless mic, mixing desk) in Berlin, which probably would have produced something higher quality.

So, thoughts:

• The firsts you list are pretty impressive and encouraging!
• Hybrid AGM worked pretty well indeed, almost flawlessly
• If pre-recording is desired, it would be helpful to provide guidance on how best to pre-record (microphone, backdrop, framing, how to convey the slides or their timings with the video recording, etc.)
• Having some shared USB microphones in the GNOME event box would be useful, assuming that people can’t borrow one locally (which they probably can)
• When I tried to join BBB to do Q+A after my prerecorded talks, the audio I received from the room in Denver was either muted (at the Denver end) or inaudibly muffled, so we had to switch to doing Q+A purely over Matrix
• That said, doing Q+A over Matrix seemed to work well (from my end, at least), and made things more inclusive for the fully-remote participants; it won’t be included in the YouTube stream/recordings though

As a slight point of correction, the biggest greenhouse emissions from GNOME are actually from the use of GNOME on all our users’ computers (e.g. how performant/inefficient it is). Travel emissions are our second biggest. (Citation)

[sophieherold]

• @sthursfield

  Participants who are giving remote talks need high quality microphones.

  I can only second that. I think that even a $10 headset could improve the sound quality. I personally find bad audio quality very draining. And we have multiple contributors with hearing disabilities for whom this is a much bigger issue. The audio quality for meetings and talks should be something we should prioritize and speakers also should get a one-minute introduction on the topic or something. Maybe we can have a guide for that in the Handbook since it’s also a regular issue in meetings? Expensive noise-canceling headphones with integrated microphones often have a much lower audio quality than a $10 headset!

• It’s not possible to read badges as a remote attendant. Therefore, it would be nice if speakers would introduce themselves with pronouns and/or they would be shown in places where the speaker’s name is shown if the speaker feels comfortable with sharing their pronouns. Since they are already visible in the talk details on the homepage, I was a bit surprised that they weren’t inserted with the speaker’s name.

[sophieherold]

• Since for many of us, remote attendance and local events are also about accessibility, let me also add something I just got reminded of. We had live captioning at GUADEC 2021. That just seems to have disappeared afterward. For me, this feels like certain options just disappear without checking in with the community’s needs and priorities before. It also happened with remote contributions suddenly not being possible for GUADEC 2023 which apparently was not required to get a Diversity & Inclusion gold badge.

  It would be great if it wasn’t just a random surprise what a11y options are available for each year’s GUADEC but if these things are planned with the community.

• Having satellite events also brings additional challenges for upholding or advancing the GNOME standards for every event. This can be due to people not being familiar with organizing events, but also with the workload that might have to be repeated for each event. This could include things like having an emergency phone contact available, following the photography policy, having name and pronoun badges, having childcare options available, or choosing/finding a venue that covers various a11y needs. (I probably missed a ton since I never organized a GNOME event.) I don’t think that’s an argument against satellite events, especially since they can enhance a11y in themselves. But maybe we need a more ‘open source’ approach to organizing conferences with shared checklists, resources, physical material (badges, color-coded lanyards, emergency contact phones), and spaces for experienced and new event organizers alike?

[mcatanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

My opinion of “hybrid GUADEC” is mostly negative unfortunately:

• Attendance at the main event was very low, which makes it harder to justify future GUADEC travel. I did manage to accomplish a couple of important tasks that could not have been effectively done remotely, and I greatly enjoyed socializing with other GNOME community members, and there’s also something to be said for getting to know a smaller group of community members quite well. But I think we should be aiming for bigger events with more people so we can more effectively use GUADEC as planning time as we’ve done in the past. I fear an attendance “doom loop” where fewer people attend each successive year simply because the previous year’s event was small. Hopefully more people will attend GUADEC 2025 in Italy.
• The remote talks went pretty well, except for the prerecorded ones. I suggest just not allowing prerecorded talks in the future at all, but if we’re going to do so, then follow Philip’s recommendations above.
• Remote BoFs seemed to have mixed success. I was quite impressed that remote attendees were able to effectively participate in some of the BoFs. But in other BoFs, the attendees were unable to participate due to audio problems. We were mostly relying on the presenter’s laptop to record audio for the entire room, except when Till attended a session and passed around his personal wireless mics (thanks Till!).

All that said: huge thanks to this year’s organizers, especially Cassidy. I greatly enjoyed the event. The venue was good, the people were great, and I also enjoyed downtown Denver.

[mcatanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

I also want to suggest conference date honesty. The only activity on the final day was a 90 minute walking tour. I wound up changing my return flight to get home a day sooner. It’s much easier for attendees if we can schedule the right dates in the first place. Unless the final social day is really jam packed with events, it’s probably best to just tell people that stuff is happening one day after the conference and use the final day of BoFs as the official end date.

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

One more thought from me.

I work on a couple of projects. I work with Carlos on search, and we discussed almost nothing this GUADEC, because we weren’t in the same place, we didn’t plan anything in advance, and of course we never bumped into each other in the hallway.

I had lots of discussions about openQA testing with interested people who were in Denver though, who I would never have spoken to if I hadn’t been present here.

It seems almost too obvious to say, but however we divide up the community for conference, it’ll affect the structure of the different projects as well. (The existing structure of the projects will also have an effect, as you might decide which event to attend based on where your co-contributors are going).

[mdhill (Michael Hill)]

Following along from home, probably the worst way to experience GUADEC, couldn’t have gone much better from here. I couldn’t get out of work Friday, but being two hours ahead meant I could tune in at lunchtime for the opening and again at 4 pm, missing little. (What I did miss, I easily caught up in a couple of evening sessions this week.)

Live talks from Denver and Berlin were equally clear. I caught pre-recorded talks by Nate, Emmanuele and Philip. The only one with audio issues was Nate’s: it was like he was in a tunnel, but I could still make out what he was saying.

It was good to hear about the COVID policy.

[cassidyjames (Cassidy James Blaede)]

Thank you for opening up this discussion, @sthursfield! I appreciate all the feedback so far, and I’m looking forward to more feedback coming in. I like this less-official way of soliciting feedback early, as it can help us know what questions to ask in an official attendee survey. So, thanks again!

I have lots of thoughts and will try to make sense of them here. Apologies in advance if it’s a bit ramble-y.

On pre-recorded talks

I think my favorite pre-recorded talk was Design Teams Going On which was indeed recorded live at the Berlin venue and then the recording was sent to Denver day-of to re-play. The AV production value was exceptional, the audio was perfect, and it was exceptionally well-done. The one down-side was that we didn’t have Q&A for it—it was okay for that talk specifically, and it came down to timing more than logistics, but it is one area I’d like to not lose more broadly.

To me, that talk does provide a pretty clear goal for future hybrid events if possible: have an AV team/person with quality equipment to record and/or stream live from any satellite gathering. I also really appreciated that it was a live/off-the-cuff recording rather than something that felt overly prepared and stilted. I think that’s part of why @mcatanzaro wasn’t even sure if it was live or pre-recorded, which is perfect imho.

At the same time, @pwithnall’s pre-recorded talks were also perfectly intelligible to me, possibly because they were played back in the smaller (less echo-y) room. It would have been better to play back a recording from the Berlin venue, though, so I apologize for the mix-up there. And I agree that broadly, quality mics (and just a few tips!) would go a long way towards making remote participants more intelligible in the space.

@pwithnall by the way, the poor audio quality from the room was totally a laptop configuration issue! That specific laptop overamplifies the mic if it’s set all the way up, and then BBB cancels it out into basically nothing. Totally our bad at the venue for not figuring that out sooner, but it was resolved for future talks and we did have successful Q&A from that setup.

In the past, I’ve organized an entirely-remote conference (elementary edw) which came together surprisingly well. We didn’t have the problems of playing the talks back in a large venue (and I don’t want to downplay those!), but our approach was to pre-record all talks ahead of the event. Most were done via a video call with an event organizer to help give the speaker an audience and to have someone on hand to ensure the quality was good. If the presenter had the equipment/skills, they could also record themselves locally for higher quality, and a few people did. Then, on the actual date of the event, we had live Q&A with the presenters (when possible) after their specific talk was streamed. A professional AV/streaming team (Jupiter Broadcasting) helped “emcee” the event, providing moderation of questions and filling the gaps between time slots. As a completely remote event it was super effective, but we also 100% missed all of the social aspect; it was a bunch of talks, a little bit of Q&A, but none of that in-person bonding that is such a huge part of GUADEC for me and others.

On “hallway track”/social events

I really, really missed hanging out with, running into, grabbing a drink with, etc. everyone who attended remotely. The social aspect of GUADEC is consistently one of the top-cited reasons I hear people attend—from long-time attendees and people on the advisory board to first-time attendees and even single-day drop-in guests. GUADEC and these sort of in-person events are the sort of social recharge that I appreciate to be regularly reminded of the humanity of everyone involved. By splitting the community into two distinct groups, it meant that I couldn’t hang out with most of the design team; I couldn’t grab a bite with half of the people I usually only see once a year; I couldn’t show off my cool city to all of my GNOME friends (or be shown their cool city!).

Don’t get me wrong, I had a blast at GUADEC in Denver and greatly appreciated everyone who did come! But I also had this sad feeling afterwards because I still miss everyone who didn’t attend. And that’s a huge bummer to me. I would hate to lose that sense of humanity and friendship if we just have people attend in their own bubbles every year instead of getting everyone together in person.

On making the experience better for remote attendees

Thank you for the feedback on multiple points, @sthursfield, @sophieherold, and @mcatanzaro! I see everything that makes remote attendance better as a sort of “curb cut.” That is, a feature that really makes the experience better for everyone—including those who need them for accessibility reasons. Focusing in on all of these seems like a no-brainer, and I’m bummed we weren’t able to deliver on them all this year:

• Consistently announcing names/pronouns as part of the format
• Guidelines at least and hardware at best for remote presenters
• Live captioning
• More consistent AV setups for BoFs
• Explicit guidelines for remote/satellite events

Some of this was due in part to a tighter budget this year as well as fewer volunteer sign-ups; i.e. it’s hard to provide live captioning when you don’t have captioner volunteers nor the funds to hire a dedicated service. But we also learned a lot by doing the best we could with what we had—and it’s important to move forward by taking this feedback and working to make future events better.

On a “hybrid” setup

I was extremely proud of the fact that we were able to pull of several hybrid talks/sessions, and the fact that they got better as the week went on (we sorted out some technicalities of routing audio both directions after the first day). I think this can work really well, but it also requires a lot from the local teams in each main location, and can easily go wrong depending on any remote speakers’ setup (like poor audio, poor network, etc.).

I was super happy with how it turned out, and it worked better than it had any right to, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. It was a lot of last-second troubleshooting and tweaking and hoping that it wouldn’t all blow up. If it looked simple/easy, then we succeeded in our job of making the AV as invisible as possible—but it was not easy or stress-free.

On organizing an event

Holy crap, I did not realize how much would go into organizing GUADEC! I think this is an area where we can improve things, and I can help by sharing my experience more in-depth in a blog post or something later. We start out with a sort of “template” for planning GUADEC based on previous years, but I think this could be formalized a bit more, and the processes could be vastly improved—whether that’s more consistently using the GitLab issue tracker, having a louder call to get people involved, etc. Right now a lot of the work seems to fall on the GNOME Foundation staff—who are all amazing!—but it feels like we could share the load with the community a bit more. And that probably starts out by making the entire process more visible.

In summary

My current thought based on my experiences and discussions with people is that GNOME should:

• have a regularly-scheduled flagship “centralized” event to retain those important social/humanity aspects; whether that’s annual or biannual is probably less important than coming together to agree to try to make it a thing, though it probably shouldn’t be only in Europe every time due to that limiting the potential attendees to a certain region/those privileged enough to be able to attend.

• have a regular entirely remote/satellite event to broaden the accessibility of regular participation in GNOME across geography but also timezones, preference to not travel/gather, etc. This could be a really exciting experimental space to try all kinds of new things like edw or encouraging many more smaller, simultaneous remote events.

I have way more thoughts about all of this, but I’m also super beat from GUADEC. I’ll plan to write up some sort of retrospective blog post later, after I’ve gotten a bit more sleep. Thanks again to everyone here for sharing their thoughts and feedback; it means a lot!

[Scott_Jenson]

I want to echo @cassidyjames ’ comments about really REALLY missing not being about to go out and get a drink with people. I enjoyed giving my talk, had a reasonable discussion afterwards, but it would have been 100x better if we could have discussed it more in person.

I understand the need to be more remote but if so, they we really need to work on social solutions, something like having a general room and then limited size breakout rooms where people can talk. I don’t know how well this would work, I just want us to realize we’re stuck between “Awesome Social” which is high carbon and “Sad Solitude” which is low carbon.

For my part, I’m going to try to be at the next GUADEC if possible but if we’re going to be remote, let’s at least discuss a few different things we could try.

[mcatanzaro (Michael Catanzaro)]

@cassidyjames

I think my favorite pre-recorded talk was Design Teams Going On which was indeed recorded live at the Berlin venue and then the recording was sent to Denver day-of to re-play. The AV production value was exceptional, the audio was perfect, and it was exceptionally well-done.

Um, yeah, I think I noticed you starting the video, but forgot about it by the time I wrote my comment above. Agree that professionally recorded talks like that are fine.

[thibaultamartin (Thib)]

@cassidyjames

our approach was to pre-record all talks ahead of the event. Most were done via a video call with an event organizer to help give the speaker an audience and to have someone on hand to ensure the quality was good. If the presenter had the equipment/skills, they could also record themselves locally for higher quality, and a few people did. Then, on the actual date of the event, we had live Q&A with the presenters (when possible) after their specific talk was streamed.

This is also how the online-only FOSDEM was done during Covid, with a complex Matrix setup where a breakout matrix room would be announced in the track matrix room. Such a complex setup requires a strong on-call tech team, and I’m not sure this is something we want or can afford to have. The event was also on a slightly different scale, so more things had to be automated.

Most people don’t come for the talks but to bump into people. I really like the idea of having pre-recorded talks (and QA’ing the quality beforehand) + having both satellite events and cross-streaming for the Q&A.

This also makes remote attendance easier for various countries (we have contributors and friends for whom it’s difficult and expensive to get a visa to the USA or Europe), ultimately making the event more inclusive for those who otherwise couldn’t attend.

Another of my key takeaways is that the “Users And” in GUADEC is a bit of a lie, and that’s something we need to pay attention to. I would love for us to define more clearly who GNOME serves (bearing in mind “everyone” doesn’t exist) and to see those users at the conference.

[gbsneto (Georges Basile Stavracas Neto)]

My thoughts about this year’s GUADEC, starting from the more positive ones:

• I think having the infrastructure for remote participation augments GUADEC, and is worthy investing in. It allowed a number of people to participate, which otherwise wouldn’t have participated.
• Having fewer people meant I spent more time with the same people, which I felt deepened our relationships, and allowed for more profound and interesting conversations. To me this was fantastic.
• I think the keynote this year was probably the best keynote I’ve ever seen in GUADEC, and I was super happy to talk to Ryan before the keynote (we share the pains of calendaring), and also the post-keynote conversations that gave me new insights and perspectives.
• This was probably the first GUADEC in which I returned home energized by the event. Probably a consequence of spending quality time with people, having meaningful conversations, and the great keynote. I don’t think I ever returned from GUADEC wanting to do stuff before, this one felt great to me.
• The venue in Denver was lovely!

Not so positive thoughts:

• I felt that this year, the attempt was to split GUADEC, and that turned out pretty disappointing to me. GUADEC, to me, is a community social event with a technical tone. The talks are great, of course, but I mostly look forward to the people, and I very much missed the people who were not in Denver.
• In particular, half of the Mutter & Shell team was in Berlin, the other half was in Denver. We couldn’t talk about Mutter & Shell informally and in high-bandwidth like in previous GUADECs.
  • From past experiences, excellent ideas and action plans come out of the Mutter & Shell folks sitting together in the same room. That includes for example re-architecturings, performance improvements, getting everyone up to speed about hardware features, etc.
  • I’m not going to do any deep maths, @pwithnall has numbers about it for reference, but the consequence of not having this high-bandwidth venue for compositor chitchatting is, quite simply, we won’t have post-GUADEC improvements.
  • From this perspective, maybe this GUADEC might have been worse environmentally-wise?
• I think most of us felt a certain level of tension, and being separated increased that feeling. We in Denver didn’t know what was happening on the other side.

[dylanmccall]

First, let me just say I really enjoyed GUADEC in Denver. You all did an excellent job, I loved the venue, the city, and spending time with so many awesome people

I also appreciated the specific mention of the COVID policy at the event, and I agree the venue - all the rooms, including for BoFs - worked well for the hybrid setup.

One thing I love about a conference like GUADEC is its ability to break down cliques and bubbles; encouraging people to engage with areas of the project they wouldn’t otherwise engage with. I was talking about this with people who focus more on the community and governance end of GNOME. Despite the occasional inconvenience, I like it when a conference schedule nudges attendees into tracks they wouldn’t usually pay attention to (or feel welcome in). It’s that type of movement which helps a community to learn and grow.

With that in mind, hybrid GUADEC scares me just a little bit because it presents an opportunity for bubbles and cliquiness to grow. Both in the way people interact with remote events, and in the way parts of the community can become geographically isolated.

That isn’t a reason not to do it at all, but I think it’s really important to be thoughtful about it.

I appreciated having good quality AV for all the remote interactions with folks in Berlin. But I don’t think it’s a good thing that we do the same mini GUADEC every year. I think the Berlin event is amazing, I hope to attend some day if I ever end up nearby at the same time, and I think it should keep happening every year for as long as the organizers can do it. But I think it should be decoupled from GUADEC at least half of the time. If we want this mini GUADEC + big GUADEC thing to work, we need to do it in a way that it isn’t the same people every time who are close to the mini event. Importantly, this means that different people should have the opportunity to attend a closer-to-home event each year.

For a future North America GUADEC, it would be interesting if we had a way to guesstimate ahead of time about the climate impact of an event on the west coast or east coast. (Or does that happen and I just didn’t notice?). For instance, I don’t know if there’s anyone local here with event planning experience, but I’d be interested to look into the options for a big or mini GUADEC in Vancouver. However, I’m unsure if that would be a reasonable flying destination for a big enough chunk of the community, and maybe I need to bug some Montreal people instead.

[Sid]

Since most of the issues have already been discussed, I’d like to cover others.

GUADEC sessions were good, barring the occasional audio issues. Nice to see GNOME desktop on the big screen used by presenters.

One thing I wanted to point out was Jeff’s talk on GNOME Calendar. I guess there was no video of Jeff (at least on YouTube stream), but there was clear audio + slides. As a remote user, I could follow the talk perfectly fine even without any video. Point being audio quality (75%) is much more important than video (25%) for talks in GUADEC.

Questions and feedback:

1. Promotion:

   I feel GUADEC was not being promoted actively. It’s easy to miss out on the GUADEC dates due to our schedules. I didn’t get a chance to watch Day 1 sessions live, as I missed the dates. I kind of came to know GUADEC was live from a discourse thread. We should be doing minimal promotion starting a week before GUADEC.

   Simple one would be to have a GUADEC banner in GNOME discourse (as shown below) and gitlab pages.

   Few days before GUADEC:

   

   When GUADEC sessions are live streaming:

   

2. Media partners:

   As a follow up to [1], I see media partners being listed under sponsors. Other than the initial announcement of GUADEC 2024 on Dec 2023 by 9to5linux.com, I don’t see any media coverage on GUADEC. Hope this could be improved next year.

3. Is there a reason to have YouTube live chat disabled for users?

4. I find the BoF term to be a bit convoluted and confusing. Is there a reason not to have simpler terms like hackfest / hackathon / workshop etc.

5. IIRC BigBlueButton is available only for foundation members (via LDAP account). So, are BoF remote sessions not available to the general GNOME community (non-foundation members) ?

6. I think it would be nice to have https://guadec.gnome.org/, https://guadec.gnome.org/2023 etc rather than https://events.gnome.org/event/209/ in the browser URL bar.

7. Would really like the GUADEC organizers and volunteers to be properly thanked on stage during conference closing. GNOME goodies as gifts would be nice too.