Hybrid meetings

“a meeting where some participants are together in a physical room,
while others are located elsewhere”

• Remote attendees can’t be expected to be online for 8 hours straight
• In-person attendees expect to fully use the time together
• Everyone needs to feel that they are equal participants

Challenges

Health Safety

COVID (BA.4, BA.5, BA.2.75, …), Monkeypox, …

Planning

• Agenda
• Preparation

Facilitating

• Meeting instructions
• Managing the speaking queue
• Managing the time

Build your agenda with care

• Consider that not all agenda items require everyone to be there
• Smaller groups/breakouts supports easier/better timezone management
  • Make sure to list Vancouver Canada (UTC-7) AND UTC timezones
• Require reports from the smaller groups when reconvening in plenary

See also a mockup agenda

Meeting times, and breaks

Breaks:

• Coffee: 9:30 - 11:00, 15:00 - 16:30
• Lunches: 11:30 - 14:00

Make sure to allow proper breaks for everyone, avoid long zoom hours

Allow 10 minutes for participants to change rooms
 --> your one-hour meeting is actually 50 minutes

Coordinate with other groups for breaks but outdoor lunch seating is limited

Update and maintain your Meeting calendars

Your meetings are in your Group calendar(s), eg CSS

• zoom info: you may reuse your regular zoom info or use the Zoom Room

   Other systems are not recommended (but not disallowed; you’ll be on your own)

• Adjusted times: allow time for participants to move around
• Indicate break times on your agenda (deadline: September 1st)

   This will be used for food safety and may need adjustments

• Agenda (link or full text): don’t make others guess where it is

Facilitating

Do:

1. Do your best to keep each topic within the time announced in the agenda
2. Manage the queue continuously and fairly between in-person/remote
3. Use straw polls (can live with/cannot live with) to assess current levels of consensus
4. Summarize the status of each topic at the beginning and end of a session

Don’t:

1. Lose track of the time, the queue, or the session goal
2. Allow side conversations
3. Forget to queue to provide your own opinions

Things to be aware of when adjusting agendas

Ensure required participants can adjust to new time slots and be mindful of the cascading effects:

• Participants who need to adjust family commitments
• Participants who need to move between meetings
• May get late/early in some timezones

If you need help/support

Reach out to your team contact or find any team member

Use IRC: #tpac-help

Preparing for Accessibility

“Hybrid” means getting both in-person and remote accessibility to work well together

• Ask all presenters to read “How to Make Your Presentations Accessible to All” in advance
• Prepare accessible versions of materials in advance
• Send presentation materials to interpreters and captioners in advance
• Let people know that they’ll need to speak into the microphones clearly
• Read sections of “Accessibility of Remote Meetings” on how to host and participate in remote meetings

Audio/Video equipment

Accepts direct HDMI input from a laptop for screen sharing

We will provide detailed instructions with each unit.

Sample slides for your meeting(s)

1. Safety rules reminders
2. CEPC reminders
3. Accessibility/International reminders
4. Tooling
5. Queueing reminders
6. Scribing reminders

Safety reminders

While attending TPAC, follow the Health Rules:

• Authorized masks are required indoors at all time (no exceptions)

  If you need to remove your mask during a meeting, keep it short (but keep enjoying that water/coffee)

• Daily test is expected

Accommodate participants' needs for physical distancing and other accommodations or precautions due to health concerns

Lunch boxes will be provided for inside or outside. There is limited outdoor seating at the hotel but there are public parks within a 10-minute walk.

Code of Conduct

Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

It’s one Web, so let’s keep working together:

• Appreciate and accommodate our similarities and differences, be inclusive
• Have empathy when discussing sensitive issues
• Treat everyone with respect
• Be honest, be truthful
• Be aware of how much time is taken up
• Be sensitive to language differences
• Respect confidentiality and privacy

Accessibility and Internationalization

Good things to remember to help communication in a worldwide organization:

• English is not the primary language of all participants (avoid idiomatic expression), speak slowly
• If you’re doing a presentation to the Group:
  • consider pre-recording (gain time and facilitate remote participants)
  • Describe the slides if there are graphics and indicate out loud each slide transition
• Follow the guidance in How to Make Your Presentations Accessible to All and Accessibility of Remote Meetings, especially Creating accessible content for remote meetings

Accessibility tips during meeting

• Remember we have captioning available if asked by participants
• Does anyone need electronic copies of the materials?
• Please be sure to always speak facing the microphone
• Please respect queuing as it helps remote participants
• Let Chairs or team contact know if you have accessibility needs

Tooling

1. Make sure everyone is on the wifi and on the Group chat (eg IRC)
2. Zoom remote participants, please mute unless you’re speaking to the Group
3. GitHub: make sure your group participants have linked their W3C account with their GitHub account, to facilitate access to W3C GitHub
4. Ask permission before recording; no recording without consent from all participants
5. Establish rules for use of the transcript if you enable automatic transcription

Queuing reminders

On IRC, know your Zakim commands:

• present+
• q+, q-, qq+

One conversation at a time: no side conversation in the meeting room (those get picked up by microphones!)

Scribing reminders

Don’t hesitate to:

1. Ask folks to type present+ in IRC to get the list of of participants
2. Interrupt the meeting if you’re missing something or getting distracted
3. Ask for someone to scribe you while you’re speaking
   

   They can use scribe+, scribe-

4. Know the bots’ commands (if you’re using IRC):
   

   Use s/foo/bar/, topic:, subtopic:, github: