2020-06-02

Attending: Will, June, Dominik, Frances, Jean-Marie, Mark, Josh, Simon, Jason, Wilma, Petr,

Melissa, Emil, Chris, Kevin,

Start: 2:00 pm

1. Accepting minutes from last meeting

2. Project Status

(2-3 minutes each)

• IDR

  • prod83 is running (release will constitute the end of migration)

  • Next release: 3 studies by the end of the month

• SA (learning/mail)

  • Cleaned up a couple of hundred user accounts on Virtual

    Microscope to keep it fast.

  • Will look at if Google Suite can suffice for all lists beyond

    image.sc discussion instead of office 365 - more testing needed

  • Information Security Awareness Training mandatory refresher. By

    August.

    • Will schedule a time to do it together

• Glencoe: Chris:

  • Processing roi tool feedback

  • Looking at tileDB, especially Java side. Compare with zarr/n5

    etc

    • Notes / feature comparison available soon

• Community

  • Request some OME tool addition under [SMS

    Resources</u>](http://scottishmicroscopygroup.org.uk/newsletters)?

    • Jason: please go ahead
  • Petr: call on Thursday to discuss future zoom workshop/meeting

1. AOB

(5 min. max; tech. Discussion should be highlighted to relevant people and rescheduled)

1. Main Topic - Meeting decompress

(20-25 minutes plus 15 minutes questions max)

Prepared thoughts

• Mark: I think the online community meeting went well, no doubt

  thanks to all the work and testing done in preparation, also helped by the presenter / host split. To cover everybody each year without exhausting anybody, I wonder if it could work to have a variety of smaller, more focused meetings, more frequently. For example, each quarter, pick a time of either early or late, get pre-recorded talks in a few days in advance, then have just a couple of half-days scheduled that might not have something for everybody.

• Will:

  • Workshops worked well - positive feedback. Would be good to run

    more workshops in future.

  • Would have been nice to have a full-time instant-messaging /

    slack available to answer questions outside of zoom calls.

  • Lots of attendees new to OME who wouldn’t have travelled, so

    “intro” workshops useful

  • Great to have videos of talks (good exposure, twitter etc) but

    bit of a disconnect between the presentations and discussion. Don’t know how to improve that?

• Josh:

  • “[Global Zoom

    Day</u>](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w0oVddpkjgPYIkZS4keXl_6cLu6JucgQOkiOX578ygI/edit#gid=0)” tries to capture several of my general notes:

    • Optional 1 hour opening to go with the 1 hour closing,

      though it’s perhaps best to show a slide explaining the looseness of that period.

    • I’d strongly encourage more time between the workshops,

      which likely means for the full conference running it over more days.

    • As Mark suggests, I could see running one of these days

      more frequently, or several of them (3-5) for a full conference.

  • Clarifying recordings during registration: I think

    there was a good deal of interest in having videos of the workshops and discussions. With everything else under our belt, this might be a good one to tackle.

  • Threaded chats: as a chair, probably what would have

    helped me the most would have been a dedicated threaded chat.

  • For the NGFF topic, I think the topics need **splitting into

    binary and metadata</u>**, and perhaps a shorter combined session.

  • Similarly, I’m still in favor of splitting workshop sessions

    into clear “basic” and “advanced” sessions. Without the visual cues of who is following, more prep and/or pre-registration is likely useful to tune the content to the audience.

  • For our own benefit, all sessions should likely make it into a

    calendar. The .ics file could even be shared with the community.

    • Jason: Zoom invites do this?
  • Would repeat and extend the breakout introductions.

• J-M:

  • Hard to follow chat in zoom/notes.

  • Workshop: impossible to see chat or participants (only Dom)

  • Short videos useful to publish.

  • Splitting some workshops into basic/advanced of 1h.

  • Q&A for lightning talks missing. Difficult to find a space for

    it afterwards

  • Maybe run couple of workshops at regular intervals e.g. every

    two months. How to use iviewer, figure, script, installation etc. It does not have to be new materials every time. We could record them.

• Dom:

  • Recording of the workshop might not be necessary, questions

    usually handled in the chat.

  • Agree with Josh, threaded chats would have been useful. If there

    are multiple questions at once it can be quite tricky. Also that people who joined later can’t see the previous chat history is annoying, as one has to repeat things for them (URLs, credentials, etc).

  • +1 for the idea of short, self-contained workflow videos for

    people who miss a workshop.

  • Overall: Was good. Chatsystem in Zoom is not ideal. One Host

    dealing with letting people in, questions, etc. seems to be enough for a workshop session with ~20-30 people.

• Simon:

  • Maybe have three people per workshop: presenter, Zoom manager,

    note taker

  • For future mini-workshops instead of Zoom it might be enough to

    have a text chat only during which the OME team are available, either themed or Reddit AMA style, so more like a drop-in session

  • Threaded chats would be useful in future
• Video views:

  /uod/idr/scratch/inbox/ome2020/ome2020-access-log-mp4s.svg

• Frances:

  • Difficult to follow discussion and answer questions in zoom chat

    during Q+A. Many questions had follow-ups, which were done in zoom chat.

  • Confusion over recording of workshops. Should inform

    participants beforehand that recording will not be made public, but presentations will be available.

  • Questions in workshops were mostly done in zoom chat, but worked

    well.

  • Hangouts worked well if people knew each other.

  • Random breakout worked, but depends on the individuals in the

    group. Some participants got scared and ran away.

• Jason:

  • +’s:

    • Good, broad community engagement

    • Despite the huge technical challenges, most things worked

      well.

    • Workshops very well attended and appreciated.

    • Momentum around public data repos and NGFFs

  • Not so +’s

    • Loose ends

      • Recording of workshops

    • Chats are difficult– not sure of the solution.

      • Discussion Leader role vs Chat Leader Role?

    • Hangouts

      • Beverages or !Beverages

      • Suggesting additional sessions raises bar on

        organisation or participation

  • ?’s

    • Where was ImageJ?

      • c.f., Bio-Formats starts

Notes

• JRS:

  • Should spend some time focusing on the positive.

  • Don’t have a final tally of how many participated, but certainly

    most ever.

  • Various private emails have been coming in. Huge success.

  • Great time, great job. (All needed some hibernation time…)

• Mark: asking participants for feedback?

  • JRS: would like to construct a survey, focused on this format

  • E.g. recordings, chat, etc. (Capturing from the above)

  • JRS: other events I’ve gone to had 3x personnel. In comparison,

    we did well.

• Josh: Global zoom day: looking at rotating zoom meetings around 3

  schedules to suit participants in diverse time zones.

  • Image.sc-based zoom calls, run at different times by different

    people

  • Easiest to start with OME running zoom calls

  • Could be informal “show and tell what you’re working on” to

    better prepared/formal

  • JM: a lot depends on the schedule / frequency

  • Chris: More days, less per day.

  • Petr: a lot of prep leading up to the meeting

• Workshops

  • Mark: late arrivals to workshops had trouble catching up.

  • Will: late arrivals due to tight schedules

  • Petr: had the feeling that the workshop day was intended to be

    horrific

  • Jason: considered spreading workshops over 2 days, but pros and

    cons

  • Jason: don’t need to restrict ourselves to once per year

• Talk format

  • Will: difficult to link Q&A to the slides. Anyway to fix?

  • Will: like the lightning talks. Could shorten the others as

    well.

  • Petr: this assumes room to give the speakers feedback

    (difficult)

  • Note worries about the length of videos; we didn’t have enough

    time.

  • JRS: realities of dealing with externals

  • Chris: in the format where you have recorded talks, you have to

    be harder. Deadlines. Don’t have luxury of massaging on the day.

  • Will: shorter format might prevent the need to record before

    hand (record and discuss inline)

  • Simon: perhaps only collect links from youtube, etc. No further

    limits.

  • Chris: doesn’t solve the social issue. Couldn’t even be modified

    5 minutes before. Need to get rid of all the last minute changes.

  • Frances: more technical issues if live.

  • JRS: if we are too hard-nosed, then we won’t get any content.

  • Petr: people want to present, but are dragging their feet.

  • Will: if live, perhaps a call

  • JRS: see NIH webinar with prep session

  • Simon: how would the discussion have gone without any talks?

  • Petr: OME’s talks were crucial. How?

  • Chris: cf. NGFF would have been radically different without.

    Perhaps napari as well. Few key presentations that were brought up repeatedly. Possibly content would have been brought up anyway.

  • J-m: talks encourage people to attend particular sessions. Gave

    more weight to the discussion. Found some much clearer than live talks.

  • JRS: back to the question… no talks?

  • Simon: at least limiting them to key talks?

  • Chris: panel-like approach?

  • Will: meeting has 2 purposes– our telling the community what

    we’re doing, but having the community telling

  • Josh: see those (lightning or not) as being beneficial, but

    could also pose leading questions for the discussions

  • Mark: on being strict, if they are smaller and more frequent,

    then you can just tell someone “next time”

  • Chris: present it as an opportunity and a privilege.

  • JRS: want to also see how others are (re-)using our tools

  • Simon: do it more continually? Once-a-week?

  • JRS: or month. Yeah. Certainly heard from the community to run

    some kind of meeting more regularly, respecting time zones and sampling activity across the globe.

  • Mark: if recordings were public, then people from other time

    zones can “participate”.

  • JRS: agreed, lots of feedback that the recordings were great.

    GZD shows it’s hard to serve the entire community with live content.

  • Chris: but people were willing to wake up at 3 and hang

    around for 14 hours. Number of people participating was great. I.e. engagement. Bar is now high.

• Following discussions

  • Simon: how much did you get from verbal questions versus written

    chats?

    • Mark: noticed questions often in text and then answers

      verbally

  • JRS: really hard to follow chats, gdocs, etc.

    • Maybe not technical but social issue? Discussion leader,

      Chat leader, Technical leader

  • Josh: hard to manage IM chats at the same time as presenting - 2

    different conversations, Don’t know which questions have been dealt with

  • Simon: chat only? E.g. image.sc slack. Certainly less

    preparation.

    • Chris: need specialized moderators and bidirectional

      communication.

    • Raising the bar on the chat, puts a technical burden.

      Authentication. Licenses.

    • Basically cheated during the whole meeting, security by

      obscurity.

    • Simon: was thinking it would be a lower level. Online

      presentation and a relatively casual discussion. Treat it like any other community.

    • Chris: e.g. difficult to manage a discord community

    • JRS: imaging reddit AMA? Perhaps an AND rather than an OR.

      But note the number of attendees who don’t know slack.

    • Mark: re: following the zoom chats, had a blank document for

      capturing things that still might need raising verbally.

    • Josh: can see that being a solution if the various leaders

• ImageJ

  • JRS: Upgrade checks

  • Topics asked (by bonafide users)

  • J-m: some expression of integration (KNIME, etc)

• Roadmap

  • Will: how do we process all the content feedback? Changing

    directions?

Actions:

• Relatively short survey: format, videos, discussions (gdoc over next

  few days)

• Next format(s) & target(s) for digital discussion(s).

• Blue box follow-ups.

  • Simon: does that cover everyone who would join? Future pitches.

    Focused on topic.