3 Conference Room Use

Video has been used in the conference rooms for:

• routine inter-site meetings and workgroup discussions, e.g., Data Management inter-site working groups and Scientific Staff meetings;
• personnel interviews involving staff at all NRAO sites;
• ``tutorial" presentations, both within divisions such as Data Management and Human Resources, and between divisions, e.g., computing security presentations to other divisions at multiple sites;
• opening ``lunch talks" and discussions at one site to interactive participation from others, e.g. TUNA Lunch and Computer Lunch in Charlottesville have been attended from Green Bank and Socorro, VLA and VLBA Test Meetings at the AOC have been attended from Charlottesville;

• meetings with sites outside the NRAO.

Video conferencing has several specific advantages over telephone conferencing for such small-room meetings:

• Non-verbal communication can be an important factor in any meeting that is trying to achieve full agreement on, or comprehension of, an issue by all participants. For example, someone may signify in words that they understand or agree with a point while their facial expression or body language implies otherwise. Frowns, nods, puzzled looks, inattention, etc. convey messages that are absent from phone meetings and may differ from those conveyed verbally. It has been estimated that over 75% of message transfer in face-to-face human communication is non-verbal. Video conferencing can make up much of this deficit if some effort is made to provide clear views of the meeting participants at all sites.

• Visual aids such as overhead transparencies, paper documents shown on a document camera, sketches or notes on a whiteboard can also be used during meetings (although NRAO's long history of telephone meetings may make us somewhat slow to capitalize on this new capability).

• Not all NRAO staff recognize each other by voice, so video meetings can be much better than phone meetings as a way for new staff to begin to know colleagues at other sites (as well as making it easier for everyone to identify who is speaking during a meeting).

• For better or worse, participants can get a truer sense of meeting dynamics in video conferences (who is present, level of attention being paid to discussion, etc.)

• Video meetings over the Intranet or Internet do not incur long-distance phone charges.

Video meetings also have some disadvantages:

• The equipment is only available in one room at each site, and these rooms are often heavily booked. Video meetings can therefore be harder to schedule than phone meetings.

• To gain full value from a video meeting requires some camera awareness by participants and some camera movement to provide clear views of all speakers. This can increase the burden on meeting organizers.

• A small but noticeable time delay between sites occurs in multi-site meetings because the audio and video signals must be compressed, transmitted to the hub, retransmitted from the hub, and then decompressed. The departure from true ``real time video" when using the hub makes it harder to interrupt a speaker at another site than it would be during a phone meeting. This effect must be taken into account by participants and particularly by meeting chairs. (Future software and hardware improvements may reduce the delay, but are unlikely to eliminate it.) Video meetings with many attendees at multiple sites therefore need attentive chairing to structure the discussion and to ensure that contributions from all sites are ``heard" equally. Multi-site meetings in which vigorous unstructured discussion is expected, and which do not require visual aids, may still be better hosted by phone.

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