Wikimedia Hackathon 2020/Remote Hackathon/Feedback

There will not be a feedback survey for this Remote Hackathon. If you would like to provide feedback so that other future organizers can learn from us please add it below.

This event is an experiment with the intention of trying whatever remote collaboration ideas people are interested in, specifically so that we can better understand what works

Feedback
Please keep in mind as you provide feedback that there was no central organizing team and all ideas were implemented by individuals or small groups building this event together. All feedback should be framed in a way that it would be useable by future remote / virtual event organizers who did not participate in the remote hackathon and not specific to making this exact event better.

Add additional categories of feedback below if there is anything you are specifically interested in gathering lessons about.

What worked that we should try again?

 * Multiple Telegram channels
 * Having people stream piano playing and hacking music on twitch was really fun
 * "The afternoon walk" - A really good way of people sharing a bit about themselves without having to talk too much about themselves.
 * Remo. I thought the format that allowed people to move about and meet other people was nice, but might make more sense earlier in an event with some icebreaker activities.

Can you comment on successes or failures of different chat programs or video conferencing services that were used?

 * I used Google Meet for my "introduction to SPARQL" presentation but I didn't realized that people need a Google mail Google account to join and I had to accept/validate each and every participant entering. At least one person couldn't join :( That said, Google Meet is still mostly an efficient tool (once connected, I could hear people perfectly, which is not always the case with other platforms) and maybe there is some equivalent and efficient free software but I don't know which one is best. A recommendation of the "best tool(s) available" would have been ideal (for both presenter and listener). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 14:51, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikimedia meet works much better in Chrome than firefox. Ladsgroup (talk) 15:56, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
 * To add to the above. Yes you need a Google account (not a Google mail account, I have no such thing VIGNERON), but it works just fine in Firefox for me. Not everyone was able to connect because of various technical difficulties. Multichill (talk) 16:12, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Anything else / general advice for future organizers

 * Suggest that people leading sessions have a second person with them in the session who is not presenting. That person's job can be to help people who join late figure out what is going on (using the chat). To look up relevant links that come up. To keep track of questions and count the number of people who join the session. Generally just to provide any background support needed.
 * More strongly urge people who are running sessions in a presentation format to record their sessions. Many collaborative style sessions should not be recorded so that people feel comfortable asking questions so video recording of sessions should never be mandatory. But recording sessions help people from different timezones catch up.
 * Combot on telegram can give you an idea of how many people were active and when. Some remote events wont have a registration form and you may have some participants show up anyways without registering.

General metrics

 * 500 messages in the main hackathon telegram channel in the first 7 hours of the Remote Hackathon
 * 50 messages in the newcomer support channel in the first 7 hours of the Remote Hackathon
 * We estimate 150 individual participants stopping in, normally about 80 people were actively reading the telegram channel at all times, 55 people joined the hackathon showcase to view. 16 projects were presented, 19 projects were added as complete to the etherpad, 51 projects / tasks were added to the Phabrcaitor work board.
 * Add you individual session here, the number of participants you had, and any comments you have about running the remote hackathon session
 * Introduction to Wikidata for beginners: 2-6 people at all times, unsure of total unique participants
 * Introduction to SPARQL for beginners: 10-15 people at all times, approximately 20 unique participants.
 * (Social event on 9 May) Wikimedia Hackathon background music for work (7 hours 15 mins): Average viewers throughout the stream 5. Maximum people online at any time: 10. Total 41 views from 31 unique viewers.
 * Wikidata workflow from Harmonia Amanda: 9 to 12 average viewers, not sure about unique participants
 * Lucas live coding on Wikidata Lexeme Forms: average of 10 viewers
 * Wikiwalk: around 8-10 people at a time, around 15 total. It was really fun and great. Timezones are an issue of course because in some places it is dark out and hard to share your neighborhoods.
 * Wiki women's team meetup: 9 people joined, we used Jitsi. Everything was nice! :)
 * Untapped meetup: 30-40 individual participants. Google hangouts can only display 15 people at once so its not a good option if you want to see everyone's face at once.
 * Symposium on Wikipedia and COVID-19: More than 100 people watching the youtube stream, good community side-chatting
 * Tools for smaller wikis: 12 participants.