3.1 How can we enhance conference-room meetings?

More effective use of the system requires some technical improvements, but also some attention to effectiveness by meeting chairs.

• Use the video hub only when more than two sites are involved. Audio and video quality are significantly better point-to-point than through the hub as less signal processing is needed. The video hub should not be used unless its multiplexing capability is needed.

• Be aware that good audio is as critical to a successful video meeting as it is to a phone meeting. The microphone pods for the video systems can pick up even quiet speakers at the edges of the rooms clearly in isolation. Their built-in switching may, however, prevent someone with a quiet voice in a room corner from being heard if competing with a projector fan or with someone closer to a pod who creates a distraction. Speakers who face away from the pods while pointing to a projected slide may become hard to hear over someone in their audience who is next to a microphone. Audio could be improved by adding extra microphones but meeting chairs should also pay attention to where the microphone pods are placed relative to noisy devices such as overhead projectors, LCD projectors, laptop keyboards. Meeting chairs could also ask whether remote sites have any difficulty hearing speakers at their site, and remote site participants should not be shy to ask inaudible people at another site to speak louder. Meeting participants who sit far from the microphones should also expect to speak louder in order to be heard clearly. (These factors apply to phone meetings as well, but, unlike in phone meetings, people at far sites can become aware of the reason for poor audio from someone at another site and can therefore provide useful feedback about a problem that the originating site is unaware of.)

• Meeting chairs should try to stay as aware of, and responsive to, people at the remote sites as they are to people at their own site. Chairs should poll remote sites for comments on important items and also watch the video attendees as well as those in their own room when soliciting discussion. In the largest inter-site meetings, we might encourage the polite (but unusual, at the NRAO) practice of raising your hand to be recognized by the chair before speaking. This would also allow a site to focus its camera on someone who wants to speak, thus ``queuing" them to the meeting chair². People who chair meetings in which not all participants know each other well should make introductions at the start of the meetings, if they would have done so in a face-to-face meeting between the same people. These steps would of course increase the formality of large meetings, but in general the more structured multi-site meetings are those most likely to be enhanced by video.

• At a site with many attendees in a video meeting, someone should be asked to be ``local video chair", to assist the meeting chair by pointing their camera to local site speakers, or would-be speakers, so they can be seen clearly³. It would be helpful if a few more staff at each site became familiar with the operation of the video cameras and of the overall capabilities of the system, as described in the Video Conferencing Manual.

• Consider the response and resolution of the video system when planning to use visual aids. Presenters should use large fonts on transparencies where possible and not rely on subtle color differences to distinguish items. If possible, they should test visibility of a sample visual aid on the video monitor as well as in the room while preparing the aid. (Visual aids that are clear over the video system will always be easier to read in the live room as well.)

• Use direct Intranet links to share computer presentations in parallel with the video feed. This is important for software demonstrations, computer tutorials, etc. Each video conferencing system originally came with a computer intended for this purpose. It is much more effective to share computer screens with the other sites' computers and LCD projectors directly over the Intranet in parallel with the video feed than it is to degrade them to TV video resolution and color fidelity via the video camera. Direct data links can also be used to share control of a computer application across sites during a tutorial or demonstration. Every NRAO conference room and auditorium should be permanently equipped with a small-footprint computer that is connected to our Intranet, and with an LCD projector to project that computer's screen locally. (An immediate goal is to reduce the footprint of the TV monitors in the AOC conference room to make more room for such ancillary equipment to be used there.)

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