Meeting Etiquette

The following is based on past experience. Adhering to these simple rules should make life a lot easier for all meeting participants!

Meeting preparation

In general, the audio is the most important ingredient in deciding whether or not a meeting system is successful or not. This is even more true for the average HEP meeting, which normally uses electronic presentations. As long as meeting participants can access these presentations, the image quality should really be of secondary importance. However, this already implies some requirements:

• electronic presentations should be uploaded to the Agenda Server;
• and this should preferably be done (also) in a format that is easily readable on all platforms: PDF. This is fairly straightforward under Linux or Mac OS, but even under Windows, there are freely available programs to convert from Office documents. So there is little excuse not to do so!

Audio muting

It is quite hard (and costly) to provide high quality audio for large meeting rooms. As a result, we cannot simply act as if we are physically in the same meeting room. The following simple rule greatly reduces possible audio problems: mute your site, unless it has something to say. This holds for the FNAL meeting rooms, too!

This not only reduces the hassle of voice switching the video between sites when two sites are producing about the same volume; it improves the audio quality, for multiple reasons:

• there is a tendency for multiple conversations to develop, especially in larger meeting rooms. This can be very distracting, especially if the nominal speaker is in a different room (and hence will not "naturally" dominate the sound produced by the site);
• many (small) sites have opted for a desktop based videoconferencing solution. There is nothing wrong with this a priori, but the reason for doing so is mostly financial constraints. In this case, one really has to watch out with the audio quality: if no echo cancelation takes place, and audio reception is not separated from audio transmission (e.g. by using a headset), nasty resonances can develop. Fortunately, even audio devices with proper echo cancelation have become affordable (a list can be found e.g. on the SeeVogh/Vidyo web pages); but good practice helps everyone.

Microphones

Finally, to improve the audio quality even more, speakers should wear microphones. At least in the larger meeting rooms, this really helps people at other sites follow the meeting.