"remote participation" refers to folks who are not physically present at the summit venue, I assume.

• Live video and audio streaming? Even if it's just some Youtube (or such) stream for the start, though need to have plan to get acceptable audio quality and URLs in advance to allow joining.
• IRC / Etherpad backchannel with a dedicated person present at the summit to bring up any relevant stuff mentioned on IRC?
• Calls for (written text) input before and/or after sessions in the corresponding Phab tasks?

Yeah, exactly Andre.
We are planning to try to extend the reach of the summit by experimenting with ways to help people who are not at the event participate.

I had not thought of the calls for written input in advance of the sessions, good idea to think about.

We will also have volunteers who are going to be "remote advocates" who will help remote people via IRC by explaining things like who is talking at specific times, anything that gets lost on the video stream. They can also ask the questions that remote people might have or help get other questions answered.

For the hacking day we will have a remote sign up sheet were people who are remote but still might want to help with projects offer their skill sets and let people at the hackathon get in touch with them if that specific thing is needed for a project.

@MelodyKramer and I are playing around with other ideas as well. Maybe a google hangout with a host just for remote people to spend time in with a fire place background. I have been introduced to a conference organizer for Mozilla who has a lot of experience with this also so we might learn a few things there as well.

The details of this all have not been completely worked out yet, so if there is anybody out there who wants to help, has ideas or have seen remote support done well in other conferences should feel free to speak up or help! :)

Rachel and I have spoken about this but I thought I would note this here for others:

Remote participation is done extremely well at SRCCON. Each session has a unique Etherpad and someone within each session is tasked with taking notes. Each Etherpad is set up beforehand with the name of the session, a description, and a short outline for the notetaker to follow. Example. I would be happy to take on this task if we think it might be useful.

They also ask people present in the session to author short writeups which are linked to the presentation later on. (Example: http://srccon.org/docs/ - search for "Your writeups, we want them.") I like this because it adds to a notetaker's work, and a person writing something up later might think of new things to note.

I love the idea of asking for input before and after the event within the Phab ticket.

We will need to write a guide for people in the roles of "notetaker", "IRC remote advocate", and anything else we designate. I am happy to write these up after we solidify the list of helpers. I will likely not be in person at the event, and am happy to be the "IRC Emcee" who helps acclimate remote folks to the chat and gives them all of the resources they need to follow along. I will likely need to work in conjunction with someone on-site who can pass along questions and help us learn anything that gets lost on the video stream, as @Rfarrand pointed out!

Mel

In T146613#2667575, @MelodyKramer wrote:

Rachel and I have spoken about this but I thought I would note this [in T146613#2667575] for others

Thanks for the summary @MelodyKramer! I also love the idea of asking for input before and after the event within the Phab ticket. I would amend that and say "...or the designated venue of choice." (since many important public conversations are happening elsewhere, e.g. on wiki talk pages). Phab seems like a good default, but we should make sure we have a clear way to designate alternatives on a per-discussion basis.

The Dev Summit is not a replacement for online conversation. The event would be a failure if this happens:

1. Online participation stalls in advance of the Dev Summit ("I'll just wait until I see everyone")
2. We have random conversations that no one was expecting to have
3. We "get back to work", and we fail to continue the conversations we started

The Dev Summit should be an opportunity to accelerate conversations that are already happening online.

It sounds like you and @Rfarrand are on it, so I'm probably just stating the obvious for you, but I think it's an important point worth restating.

Regarding notetaking, I'm pretty happy with how things worked at the "make code review not suck" discussion last year (T114419). I wrote the "summary" part of the notes in real-time on-stage while I was helping @Bawolff facilitate the meeting. The technique I was using is described in the note-taking section of mw:Good_meetings. I think, if you watch the video of the Code Review session, you could see that this would have been a very easy session for a remote participant to be involved with. The first 90 seconds of that video is me explaining how I planned to take notes.

Really good point @RobLa re: alternatives. Is there a way to ask folks to notify someone if discussions take place elsewhere? I would love to have a master list (which could easily link to other places) - something like this: http://blog.chryswu.com/2016/03/08/nicar16-slides-links-tutorials-resources/ particularly for people who can't be there in person, or who might come across this material after the fact.

Thanks for restating. I would add and might jumpstart conversations that would otherwise not have started, because the right people were in the right space at the right time, where space could easily refer to both online and offline spaces :P

I like the idea of note-taking in real time and will look at the video. Thank you for passing that along - very helpful!

In T146613#2668978, @MelodyKramer wrote:

Is there a way to ask folks to notify someone if discussions take place elsewhere? I would love to have a master list (which could easily link to other places) - something like this: http://blog.chryswu.com/2016/03/08/nicar16-slides-links-tutorials-resources/ particularly for people who can't be there in person, or who might come across this material after the fact.

I think we can keep a master list either on wiki or in Phab. I like the fact that Phab will automatically assign a reasonably short unique identifier to topics, but wiki pages have the advantage of making those identifiers readable by humans.

Thanks for restating. I would add and might jumpstart conversations that would otherwise not have started, because the right people were in the right space at the right time, where space could easily refer to both online and offline spaces :P

Good amendment. :-) We should make provisions for new conversations being jumpstarted, but we should avoid accidentally encouraging people to wait for the summit to start those conversations. One thing that can happen: people making private preparations for ideas they intended to "launch" at the summit, trying to pack too much information into their presentations. Worse, they may then attempt to make the case "we spoke about my idea at the summit, and no one objected there" (since no one had the time to review the idea). It would be better to ensure that people are motivated to attempt any complicated persuasion before the summit.

It seems that the IETF has long had this aspect right. They still insist that meeting time is only allocated to Internet Drafts that are published weeks in advance of the meetings, which they offer as required reading for the scheduled sessions. It keeps people from showing up at IETF meetings and trying to push ideas that haven't had basic scrutiny.

I like the idea of note-taking in real time and will look at the video. Thank you for passing that along - very helpful!

No problem! This gives me both the opportunity to do a couple of things:

1. Give kudos to @Aklapper and @husn_shujaat for finishing the video uploading work (see T124127). You wouldn't be able see the video had they not recently finished that work
2. Pointing out a comment that husn_shujaat made (T124127#2495223): "@Aklapper I am actually really glad you [uploaded the rest of the videos], I had a major internet breakdown in my city for the past 3 weeks, couldn't do it either way in the given time. :)" We shouldn't count of people being able to participate in the live version, because it may be more than just timezones serving as an obstacle.

All good points!

As a next step, would it be helpful if I started a doc on wiki as a guide for remote participants that we could all edit? I think it might be beneficial to think of them alongside other participants, and this way, if someone says they cannot attend, we can point them to the resources that might allow them to experience the event remotely. I'm thinking:

1. How you can attend the summit remotely
2. How we plan to take notes
3. Where you can read about topics

etc. and then we can add throughout the fall/winter?

This task welcomes an owner...

I have skimmed through the lessons learned from the previous developer summit and discussions on this thread. I'm sharing some initial thoughts on this topic below. Quim and I will talk about this in depth in our 1:1, and I will update here what we conclude.

First, I don’t seem to find any specific data that could tell what is being missed or demanded in regards to offering remote participation for those who cannot make it in person to the summit. To learn about how many people would be interested in attending the summit remotely, we could invite people to register for our online event beforehand through social media outreach; we could reach out again to folks whom we've sent travel grant rejection, and to additional participants who are beyond our maximum attendance limit. Having said that, I believe this is going to an experiment and would be an enhancement to our existing methods :)

I believe that sessions at the developer summit are mainly composed of main sessions and unconference sessions. I can think of two ways by which we could do this:

1. Offer remote participation for the main sessions during the summit
I looked at Rob’s video from last year's summit that gave me a clear sense of the space, audience, and post-session discussions we run at the summit. There are two ways I could think of by which we could offer a similar experience for our remote audience while the summit is live:

1. 1. Live stream embed of the session video on the session wiki page
We could leverage live streaming services provided by Youtube, Twitch, Livestream studio and other similar solutions to stream session videos and embed them on the fly on our main session wiki page. It seems like from the Embed Video documentation that this MediaWiki extension provides support for embedding a bunch of video formats, of which youtube and twitch are mentioned in the list of supported formats already. I briefly attended LibrePlanet online a few months ago, for which they were using a homegrown software package for streaming talks for the remote viewers. We could maybe learn from them or use their software package.

1. 2. Allowing remote participants to hangout in an Unhangout Lobby
As most of you know about Unhangout platform already, we could use the same tool to allow remote participants interested in a particular session topic to watch a live video and discuss it through the platform’s chat interface.

On a side note: For the discussion part, I have created a separate task "Improve collaborative note-taking and discussion spaces for talks for in-person and remote participants". I have shared a couple of thoughts on how we could do this more effectively, remembering some of the challenges experienced during the last year’s conference.

For our unconference sessions, which are more discussion-based, I think allowing remote attendees to chime in may not be a good idea from the following standpoints:

• It might be a lot of work for the facilitators to handle both in-person and the remote audience together, and the experience might get chaotic for both.
• Watching the live streaming of in-person group discussions may not be that useful for the remote participants.
• It might be a lot of work for us (organizers of the summit) to install equipment in each of the unconference session rooms for recording videos and to train the session facilitators in advance.

2. Offer a summary of the main sessions after the summit
Another way of engaging people who couldn't be a part of the summit could be by running the same version of it online later. We could do some planning to assign moderators for each of the unconference and main session topics that will take place at the summit, and invite the moderators to be the hosts for our online session topics later. And, of course, we could run this in an unconference style using the Unhangout platform.

Summary
It's hard to speculate which option would the people appreciate most, participating online when the summit is live, or a summary event that happens afterward. I just guess here that former would be much liked :) In my opinion, going with “Live streaming of the session video on the session wiki page” option for the upcoming summit would be a good idea because:

• We all are familiar with the use of wikis; less training efforts would be required to do the setup.
• With unexpected participation numbers, relying on tools (such as Unhangout) other than wikis may not be a good idea.
• Results from our previous summit indicate that people had a hard time navigating between different venues, so this option would help congregate everyone at one spot, which is on the session wiki

We could leverage live streaming services provided by Youtube, Twitch, Livestream studio and other similar solutions to stream session videos and embed them on the fly on our main session wiki page. It seems like from the Embed Video documentation that this MediaWiki extension provides support for embedding a bunch of video formats, of which youtube and twitch are mentioned in the list of supported formats already. I briefly attended LibrePlanet online a few months ago, for which they were using a homegrown software package for streaming talks for the remote viewers. We could maybe learn from them or use their software package.

For various political reasons, it is unlikely we will be able to use EmbedVideo, or otherwise directly embed the youtube video on our site.

What would probably be most expected by our community based on previous meetings (e.g. the metrics meeting), would be to have a live stream of the events [e.g. on youtube] (already a great step up over the existing videos which take a very long time to get posted, usually after most interest has dissipated), and also have an irc channel where people can ask questions (e.g. Have someone in the meeting watching irc and raising their hand when someone asks a question. Also having the irc channel projected in various places so participants "see" it).

This wouldn't fully integrate remotees, but I think it would be a good starting goal, and is most similar to other meetings where remotees have been included.

So far I don't know how many people we can expect to attend remotely for how much of the conference. We can invite them to add their names on wiki if they plan to participant.
It would be really helpful if somebody could come up with ideas for ways to track which are actually taking advantage of the remote participation during the event to indicate that they are doing that. How are we going to understand who is watching live streams? Who is reading the notes? Who is chatting along on IRC? etc.

It looks possible to have two rooms equipped with ghangout live streams going to youtube. Three of the other rooms will have video recording but it will not be live stream. Unconference speakers and the program committee will be able to help decide which sessions make the most sense to go in which room.

Most importantly for the moment is coming up with the plan for documentation and note taking that facilitates the remote participants. That meeting should be taking place Thursday this week and I hope we can make some progress.

We can simplify the scope of problems we want solve. For instance:

• Synchronous participation. Only for 1-2 sessions at the same time, pre-scheduled and announced well in advance, mics in hand all the time, located in the same 1-2 rooms. That's it, the rest of sessions don't have to care about synchronous at all. Google Hangout on Air + etherpad for real-tim notetaking + IRC for questions and feedback.

• Asynchronous participation. Good for all sessions (bonus points for those that have been recorded and have video available at least in YouTube right after the session). Etherpad notes pasted to session related Phabricator task right at the end -- no delays. Discussion happens in the task itself until the topic at hand leads participation to the relevant venues (follow-up tasks, wiki pages, mailing lists...)

Tentative agenda for meeting with @Rfarrand: [I'll update the task description with action items, once we finalize on this plan and run it by @Qgil]

Overview
From the discussion that took place on this thread, I conclude that it makes the most sense to go forward with the plan of offering remote participation for our main sessions only via youtube live stream, using IRC channels as a means for discussion.
IRC logs and the number of views received on the videos would help us keep track of who participated and how.
For the unconference sessions video recording: If our sessions are going to be small group discussions with (~10ish people), then I'm not sure how comfortable our participants would be in sharing their thoughts knowing that we are recording them for our remote audience for later viewing. This is just my opinion, feel free to disagree on this. On the other hand, if the sessions would be more like an expert facilitating them and talking for half the time, then it might make more sense.

Planning

• Get access to the MediaWiki YouTube channel from Rachel.
• Week of December 4th
  • Look into https://support.google.com/youtube/topic/6136989?hl=en&ref_topic=2853712. Learn how to create live streams best, and determine if any additional equipment or camera setups would be required for this work.
• Week of December 11th
  • Recruit two people who would carry out this work in two main session rooms, and find out if Srishti and Rachel would be doing this.
  • Train them on using the tools/ equipment.
• Week of December 18th
  • Add ‘How to Participate’ information to the Summit wiki page. Link ‘coming soon' (for remote URL) & 'IRC discussion link' to the schedule
  • Conduct outreach
    • Email people whom we've sent travel grant rejection, and to additional participants who are beyond our maximum attendance limit, contact a few mailing lists.
    • Contact Jeff and schedule social media posts to be sent out two weeks in advance and a few when the event is around the corner.
  • Gather all equipment we would need such as additional laptops, webcameras, furniture items.
• Week of January 2nd
  • Do a dry run at the event venue (if possible)
• On the day of the event
  • Have two people for coordinating this work being accommodated in two main session rooms. They would help create youtube links, update wiki schedule and facilitate the initial conversations on IRC.

Note: If we are doing the recording for unconference sessions too, then figure out who would be supporting the execution of this work.

Questions for Rachel

• What is the difference between pre-scheduled, unconference and main sessions?
• How many people are usually in an unconference session? ~ from one of the etherpad links, it seems 10ish.

@srishakatux

What is the difference between pre-scheduled, unconference and main sessions?

Main sessions will be in the big room, they are the things that get the most votes on Phab and we expect really large groups to participate in. We basically will need to think through some advice / guidelines on running these groups that will have facilitate decision making / discussion with actionable items for large group discussion.
Pre scheduled are similar to main sessions but just in the slightly smaller room.
Both of the above session types will be scheduled by the program committee, correct @Qgil?

Unconference sessions will not be scheduled until the day before the event or during the event. These are going to be on any topic that somebody wants to organize. We will provide space, a clear way to schedule the sessions, and some direction on expected documentation and facilitation roles but thats it.
One of our jobs during the event will be to make sure we are available to help support these sessions and their needs.

How many people are usually in an unconference session? ~ from one of the etherpad links, it seems 10ish.

70 will be the maximum based on the room size, however I am guessing that between 5-40 is more realistic. There are different sized rooms with different A/V set up available for these sessions and the speakers will choose what type fits their session best.

Regarding the youtube channel, I will give you access now! Sorry about the delay on that!
I can teach you how to create live streams, its simple to do but a bit complicated to learn. We should run one together sometime as well to make sure that the first time you do it goes smoothly, there are a lot of moving parts. Check here for the steps to organizing a live stream though: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Calendar/How_to_schedule_an_event#Tech_talk_set-up_instructions

Recruit two people who would carry out this work in two main session rooms, and find out if Srishti and Rachel would be doing this.
Train them on using the tools/ equipment.

Brendan from IT and Lani from Admin are going to be helping with this, but you can also be there helping them figure out which sessions to record and making sure the rooms and speakers know which mics to speak into and how everything is going to work. The 4 of us can have a meeting in advance of the event once we have a better plan to go over the specifics / roles.

The current room set-ups and their video recording plans (we can adjust a bit, but there is some reasoning behind these things) Check this doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CX17kZ1d6Sof9JpCAqzQaeu52tlipYibtTFqCeJnWdM/edit

Main room: professional video recording, no live stream.
Large room 1: live stream, prescheduled sessions
Large room 2: hand-held video camera, no live stream, unconferece
Mid sized room: live stream, unconference
Small room: hand-held video camera, no live stream, unconferece

Based on today's assumptions (that we may change if needed):

• The two biggest rooms will be pre-scheduled in advance, between Dec 12 and 23.
• The rest of rooms will be used for the Unconference and will not be pre-scheduled. I believe the Unconference sessions should be scheduled every day on the same morning (a usual unconference practice), but this is a discussion for T147955: Organize unconference at the Wikimedia Developer Summit 2017 .

In order to organize video in these sessions, I would apply these basic principles:

Availability of video equipment

• Video recording is provided by the organization in Rooms 1 and 2 for all pre-scheduled sessions.
• Unconference rooms 3 and 4 will have video equipment available, but recording will be optional and DIY (we might have a pool of volunteers to help)
• In Unconference rooms without video equipment, participants can self-organize recording from their laptops (instructions will be provided by the organization)

Video streaming

• Video streaming is only guaranteed in Room 1. If there is enough bandwidth, it will be also provided in Room 2.
• Unconference sessions don't have video streaming provided by the organization. Participants can self-organize streaming from their laptops (instructions will be provided by the organization).

This way the difference of video offering for pre-scheduled vs Unconference sessions is clear, pre-scheduled is clearly "Premium" and Unconference is clearly self-organized.

We should not have more than 2 streams going at a time for the sake of the bandwidth according to the wifi providers. I also think because we have up to 4 people helping with the video recording and streaming (Brendan, Lani, me, Srishti) that we should actually help them with the streaming. Its more complicated to set up then it seems and if we leave them with a complicated thing (even with clear instructions) then I think even people who would have been happy to live stream, wont. I want to build in longer breaks this year so we can go around and make sure all speakers have what they need in terms of supplies, videos, projectors, and anything else.

In T146613#2827983, @Rfarrand wrote:

I want to build in longer breaks this year so we can go around and make sure all speakers have what they need in terms of supplies, videos, projectors, and anything else.

Please let's discuss this in T150150. We need to have a skeleton schedule with the room information and the actual times and breaks as soon as possible, since we are deciding the pre-scheduled sessions as we speak.

meeting scheduled with @bcampbell, Lani, and @Rfarrand for next week to plan for video-recording, and live-streaming of sessions and discuss specific roles that each of us will take on.

From the metrics meeting today I learned that there is a live chat feature for Youtube Live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfZukI05vHg, which WMF members were using to add comments. I didn't know until now that it exists, and I think it's super easy to watch videos and comment on them without switching tabs.

So for videos that we are planning to live stream for dev summit, IMO would make sense to use Youtube's live chat feature for discussion unless people feel strongly about using IRC.

In order to post on YouTube, people need to be logged in YouTube. That is an problematic requirement to participate in a Wikimedia activity.

Shared a draft email with @Qgil and @Rfarrand that I plan to send out on Monday to Wikitech-I, our Meetup group and share with participants to whom we have sent out rejections. In the sign-up form, I've included a question: "How would you like to participate in discussions while watching the live broadcast for sessions on YouTube?" Options are below:

• IRC channel
• YouTube live chat (requires login with a Google account)

@Qgil And, we can decide later if we give the option to participate via YouTube chat or not, what say?

Having two places to discuss is not as good as having one place to discuss, right? I'd rather point people not used to IRC to http://webchat.freenode.net/

After thinking it over, yeah I agree. We are very strongly into IRC here so lets keep it that way and not add in more tools. Does that work for you @srishakatux

yes, three of us are now on the same page. we'll be sticking to IRC for remote discussions :)

met with @bcampbell and Lani today. @bcampbell will be pre-creating hangouts-on-air and will add the youtube links on the program page for the sessions we plan to live stream tomorrow.

The remote participation email was sent to 99 recipients who registered for the event and were unable to attend for various reasons.
The email (written by Srishti) can be found here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/2017/Email2 and a link to this email was included in an email to all WMF staff.

The same email linked in my last comment was sent through meetup.com to all Wikimedia Tech meetup group members.
https://www.meetup.com/wikimedia-tech/

I have taken a first shot at creating the remote participation support page. It still needs plenty of work - but I think its a good start.
Lets keep improving and adding to it!
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/2017/Remote_Participation

@Qgil & @srishakatux please take a look and edit, comment, etc.

Thank you! An email to wikitech-l and mediawiki-l cannot harm.

@Rfarrand Thank you for putting up the page, I've made some excessive edits, so pardon me, and feel free to revert/ make changes :D Mostly wanted the information to be a bit more concise and to highlight action items more.

Questions/concerns:

• You've indicated on the wiki that attendees could look into session notes during the session. I think we should not encourage any of our participants to look into notes during the sessions. I've taken that part out, instead added they could participate in discussions by commenting on Phabricator before the summit.
• Are we sure that we would be using the #wikimedia-dev channel for IRC discussions? Would it not draw non-related discussions while the sessions are running? Could we have a more dedicated channel for the summit?
• Are we thinking about offering remote attendees a way to collaborate on projects for the "Get Stuff Done Day"?

For the sake of fun, I've added a picture of a cat looking at the IRC logs, but I'm not sure if it's too much of fun or not :D

Also, one last thing: now that we have a page on 'Remote Participation', I think that the social media post should contain the link to the wiki page and not to the sign-up form as the form is already linked from the wiki page with additional info.

@Rfarrand @Qgil what do you think?

cc @CKoerner_WMF

Alright, I agree regarding pointing to the etherpads. They will find them anyways if they want to.

No, lets not use #wikimedia-dev because that is already an existing channel that has other uses. #wikidev can be our own event dedicated channel where people can chat and make announcements, etc.

Yes, for sure remote participants can be involved in get stuff done day. This already happens quite a lot. They will need to be a but more self motivated though.

I'll go back and re-edit taking those things into consideration! Thanks :) :)

No, lets not use #wikimedia-dev because that is already an existing channel that has other uses. #wikidev can be our own event dedicated channel where people can chat and make announcements, etc.

Okay sounds good! I misspelled the IRC channel name. We don't need to add it on the remote participation page, as I will soon link it from our Program page.

Yes, for sure remote participants can be involved in get stuff done day. This already happens quite a lot. They will need to be a but more self motivated though.

This is already there on the wiki :)

OK! I have added a place where remote participant advocates can sign up.
Also added a few more things. This is great! :)

@Quiddity: question about IRC, I believe last year for the dev summit we used #wikidev, however #wmhack could also be a good channel as there are often more people sitting in it year round who would be interested to follow ongoings. We can use either one. Do you have a thought?

I have all the emails of people who volunteered to be remote participant advocates. I can send them a quick email today.
Will include:

• The pre-session
• To sign up as a volunteer officially on that page
• Asking them for thoughts on how else to support remoteies
• What else?

PS: <3 the kitty! @Quiddity will probably like him as well. :)

• #wmhack is the standard channel for the Hackathons (standalone and Wikimania). That's a good option. -- (54 people currently idling in there)
• Last year's devsummit used #wikimedia-tech which is also a good option. (per) -- (202 people currently idling and sometimes talking, in there)

How many channels do we need, though? We might need 2, but let's avoid more than that, and let's avoid setting up any new channels.
I'd tentatively suggest:

• #wmhack for social chatter ("who has an adaptor?" and "has anyone seen Alice?" type discussion)
• #wmhack also used for Room 1 discussions.
• #wikimedia-tech used for Room 2 discussions.

(or something along those lines, and assuming that we're streaming both Rooms 1 & 2.)

yes, +1 to kitty picture :>

I like it! I can update the page if you agree this is a good plan Srishti?!

In T146613#2897606, @Rfarrand wrote:

OK! I have added a place where remote participant advocates can sign up.
Also added a few more things. This is great! :)

Thank you much much! :) Saw it, and is wonderful :)

In T146613#2897607, @Rfarrand wrote:

I have all the emails of people who volunteered to be remote participant advocates. I can send them a quick email today.
Will include:

• The pre-session
• To sign up as a volunteer officially on that page
• Asking them for thoughts on how else to support remoteies
• What else?

Could this wait until next week? I want to think a little bit about our note-takers, summarizers, and advocates and about the documentation work we plan to facilitate! I will share my thoughts mostly by Monday for feedback, does that sound good?

thanks, Nick! @Rfarrand sounds like a good plan, feel free to add it to the schedule.

yes, +1 to kitty picture :>

waah :)

Yes! waiting is no problem.
Adding IRC details to both remote page and program page now!

Sharing the update on this task below:

We currently have 33 sign-ups, people who were okay with their info public are listed on the remote participation page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit/2017/Remote_Participation.

I will be sending reminders to the registered participants 24 hours prior to the event. Our schedule is currently up-to-date, with sessions that we plan to live stream linked to the youtube URL.

@MelodyKramer has offered to help us with following:

• following along with remote sessions to make sure there are no issues
• Getting a # count (which shows up on youtube) of how many viewers are watching each session.
• tweet / facebook when live streaming sessions are starting (we can get you access to our social media accounts)
• add anything to our website or notes throughout the event that would help remote people find things and be successful

Jeff has made Mel an admin of the MediaWiki's social channel.

Just sent reminders to registered participants (39 so far)!

with help from @MelodyKramer: survey for our remote participants got shared via our social media channels: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeLavJQXW-Zo5AxNZHblbQI6hd0T4cFxr8KQYyZfD1Ly4DRMg/viewform