2022 talk:In-person events/London

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I tried the Pheedloop platform on Thursday, starting with the plenary. This seemed to have technical trouble and, to get good video feed it seemed that one had to go to the equivalent channel on YouTube. I sampled some other sessions and it seemed that many speakers were having trouble connecting. The text-based channels like the chat and Etherpads seemed to work best -- presumably because they are low bandwith.

On Friday, I attended the event at Wikimedia UK. The event space was fine and the talks on Wikidata were interesting but it seemed quite disconnected from the main Wikimania programme and was not very interactive.

It's now Saturday and I've gone back to the Pheedloop because there's a particular talk I want to listen to: "Wikipedia in French has deleted Pages for Deletion: Why? How? What impacts?". I reckon this is best done at home, where I can focus on the talk and handling any technology issues. I'll perhaps come to Newspeak House later for the presentations.

Tomorrow, I see that the London meetup at Penderell's Oak is listed in the programme. That's yet another platform/venue and so I'm feeling that these choices are tending to divide and dilute people's attention and attendance.

Meanwhile, on Pheedloop, the talk is hung because the "speaker is still experiencing technical issues". These are to be expected but it goes to show the power of the basic WikiMedia platform which works 24x7, delivering lots of carefully curated information to millions of users simultaneously without all these technical hitches.

Andrew Davidson (talk) 11:44, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

The speaker eventually got through on Pheedloop and it was an interesting talk though a fair bit was lost in translation. I then browsed Pheedloop but it seemed that most of the afternoon was a Hackathon. I thought about travelling to Newspeak House but had some chores to do and so tried the online Zoom facility . The strategy meeting wasn't on that, which was rather disappointing. There was then a presentation by Richard Neville of some awards. Good to see the Women's Classical Committee get an award, as I'm a member. Congratulations also to Kirsty Ross, James Boyce (?) and Lucy Hinnie. Andrew Davidson (talk) 16:28, 13 August 2022 (UTC)

It was great to see you in Newspeak House! I have had the same challenges as you - it's the same dynamic as a regular conference in terms of choosing what parallel sessions to attend, except that one session is in-person but the others are online, and switching tracks is a one-hour journey (at Wikimania Esino transferring between halls took up to 25min on foot, longer if you're in a wheelchair?). I don't have a good answer to your comment except that most online sessions are recorded so you can always prioritise the in-person sessions and interactive sessions that you want to go to most, and then watch others interesting presentations on catch-up. Deryck Chan (talk) 13:08, 14 August 2022 (UTC)