I attended a meeting in the city earlier in the week, with about 20-25 people in attendance. There were four others with me in the city here, 15 or so people in another major city, one joining from a third city, and another one (or two?) from a fourth city. The first three cities were linked by video conference (using LifeSize video conferencing gear), and the last by phone. In our location, we had two 60″ Flat Panel Sony displays — they were big. I was an attendee, I only knew one other person at the meeting (who was sitting next to me in Christchurch), and I hadn’t read the document we were going to discuss. So I was really observing the process, as well as getting up to speed on the issues.

The meeting was okay, and I think there was some consensus about the issues, but I left with three main reflections.

Shared Visual Artifacts
First, there was no attempt to create a shared artifact as the different people in the various locations gave their feedback on the document that we had gathered to discuss. If we’d all been in the same room, surely someone would have jumped up to the white board and started noting down the concerns and reflections. I think the lack of this hindered the effectiveness of the meeting later on, because while most people had spoken, we had no co-created visual artifact to ground the discussion in the latter parts of the meeting. And so it seemed to me — and others expressed some frustration too — that all of that discussion had been lost / ignored / unheard.

So how do you do this in a video conference? One idea … and it would have worked at our end because one of the 60″ displays sat unused, would be to have a camera focused on a white board, and ask someone to take notes as the various people spoke. Another option would be to use the second display linked up to a Tablet PC and OneNote, or MindManager. But something as a visual reference would have made the meeting more effective.

Independent Meeting Facilitation
Secondly, the facilitator of the meeting was from the organization that would have the responsibility to implement the ideas of the session, and although she did a good job of getting feedback, I can’t help but wondering whether her own thoughts about the document and the best next actions overshadowed what the others were saying. In other words, I wonder whether her frame of reference and her expectations filtered what she was able to hear from the other people. I entirely accept that she has to go back to her organization and they have to decide what to do, but combining the role of meeting facilitator and invested party appeared to me to be too much of a conflict.

Having an independent, impartial meeting facilitator there who had no vested interest in the outcome would have made for a better meeting experience.

Effective Use of the Technology
No one at our location knew how to use the video conferencing gear, so we couldn’t use it as well as it could have been used. For example, for the entire 2 hour meeting, all three locations that were on video showed on one of our 60″ monitors. Thus each location was small. And the city with 15 or so people around the room … well each person in that window appeared very small. Also, we had ourselves on the screen for the entire time too, something we didn’t need to see, but we didn’t know how to get rid of ourselves.

I played with the remote a fair bit during the second half of the meeting, zooming in on the others in the room with 15 or so people, and that worked reasonably okay. There was a bit of a delay from pushing a button on the remote and seeing the impact on the camera at the other end, which made for some interesting moments (“oh, what nice wallpaper they have there”). It may have been possible to do, but one of the features that I would really have liked is the ability to preset a number of camera positions, so that when Person A started talking again, I could click one button and have the camera focus in on them without me having to drive it (right-right-right-up-up-left-up-up-right). I’m sure it could be done via a slick interface and a table-top command unit. And maybe LifeSize already offer such things, but it wasn’t apparent in the meeting.

And You?
What’s your experience of video conferencing at the moment? How do you handle the issues above in your world?