Hybrid Group Meetings

Introduction

This document describes approaches for W3C “hybrid” meetings. The term hybrid here refers to a meeting where some participants are together in a physical room, while others are located elsewhere; for instance in individual (home) workspaces or with another group of participants in another physical room.

Though the circumstances of the pandemic, which halted in-person meetings in 2020 and 2021, have been difficult for all, this global pandemic event has also forced us to adapt to new ways of gathering. It has also provided us the tools to broaden global participation in our work. Those with limited means to travel to meetings have benefitted from our increased ability to gather in virtual or remote modes.

We now seek to establish effective hybrid meeting modes, where some participants may be co-located, yet interact on an equal basis with other participants in different locations; and where those who are located remotely can have equal access to participating as well.

Lessons learned and suggestions for this document are welcome in GitHub issues.

Challenges of Hybrid meetings

Hybrid meetings are already widespread in some world regions, as vaccines, tests, and therapeutics become available. We expect the pace of hybrid meetings to increase, though unpredictably in response to the spread of different variants and different regional responses to these.

Hybrid meetings add another dimension of complexity beyond a virtual meeting or an in-person meeting, so these may seem difficult to undertake. It can be challenging to include in-person and remote participants on an equal basis, and to navigate the technical and social aspects of hybrid meetings. This document presents considerations for helping hybrid meetings run smoothly.

To have a successful hybrid meeting, we must first attend to making our virtual meetings as functional as possible. If participants have “put up with” inadequate support for virtual meetings, with the expectation that a return to in-person meetings would leave these problems behind, barriers to effective virtual meetings must be addressed. Infrastructure – software, hardware, and also social practices – for virtual meetings is the foundation for productive hybrid meetings. Training is important to implementing this effectively.

Planning for effective hybrid meetings requires addressing challenges, including:

  • people who have traveled to a conference venue expect to fully use the time together, with all the opportunities for debate and so on.
  • people who participate remotely can’t be expected to be online for 8 hours straight, especially when they are in another timezone.
  • everyone needs to feel that they are equal participants, otherwise it’s actually a f2f meeting with best-effort call-in

Following are recommendations for addressing these challenges and holding successful hybrid meetings.

Planning the meeting

Planning the in-person side of a hybrid meeting

Do all the work necessary for any in-person W3C meeting:

  • Room capacities may be lower than pre-COVID to allow for necessary distancing
  • Stable high-speed Internet access is essential
  • Plan for fallbacks for every critical item, including a backup venue
  • Supplies of PPE must be available
  • Buffet food may not be allowed because of health considerations
  • Room layout must allow for placement of one or more cameras that enable remote participants to see the face of each person in the room
  • Make sure any tools you use, such as virtual whiteboards, are accessible to all participants. If a physical non-electronic whiteboard or flipchart is used, there must be a camera facing it for remote participants to view
  • Microphone placement must be planned and tested in advance. If a sufficient quantity of fixed microphones cannot be provided then two or more “pass-around” microphones can be used. One pass-around microphone is not sufficient as there will be times when two discussants are engaged with each other and passing a mic back and forth consumes too much time
  • Microphone placement must account for participants who cannot themselves speak loudly; having to repeatedly ask someone to raise their volume is both wasteful of time and disrespectful to those who may e unable to do so
  • Screen(s) of sufficient size and placement must be provided to enable all in-room participants to see the face of each remote person
  • Provide two sets of screens: one displays the gallery view of as many participants as possible and the other displays only the current speaker
  • Will there be more than one separate group of people in-person (multiple hubs)? If so, all of the above must be addressed for each

Make sure you identify the local host (if it’s not the Group Chair or Team Contact), responsible for the on-site part of the meeting.

Planning the remote side of a hybrid meeting

  • Choose a video conference system that all – or a substantial majority of all – group participants have used in regular group virtual meetings
  • Will there be multiple hubs that need to be interconnected? If so, how – and who – will do the “host” management at each hub and within the video conference system?
  • Encourage and support remote users to use high-quality microphones and cameras

Convening the meeting

State the policies of engagement; Process, Code of Conduct, PPE, venue precautions, emergency contacts

  • remind the participant of the rules of engagement at the start of each meeting
  • review for all participants any Covid-safety requirements and agreements
  • remind people of Code of Conduct requirements including always bearing in mind that some different participants have different levels of high risk(?), and to respect people’s requests for care on social distancing
  • remind people of requirements for COVID tests and related precautions
  • Patent policy?
  • if you are recording the meeting, you MUST get explicit consent from participants

Facilitating the hybrid meeting

  • Be explicit about how hand-raising (floor control) is to be done and be scrupulous about following it, especially for those in the room
  • Be explicit about how echo and background noise from remote participants will be identified and corrected (e.g. the Host muting a remote participant – and informing them they have been muted)
  • Consider how to accomodate socializing, by those who are not in the room as well as those who are
  • Consider in advance whether some socializing can integrate in-person and remote
  • Plan breaks and be explicit about how the video conferencing facilities will be handled during breaks;
    • be clear that the in-room cameras, microphones, and screens for remote participants will remain live
    • check in advance what the group wishes to do about group dinners
    • be aware of the continued need for inclusive practices during socialization
  • Technical
    • plan contingencies for equipment not working as promised and not having been tested in advance
    • bandwidth / latency insufficiencies for all the groups meeting simultaneously
  • Accessibility
  • International
    • will there be spoken language interpreters?

Meeting organizer and facilitator training

See TPAC 2022 Chair Training.

In particular, the importance of managing the queue, controlling side conversations, managing the meeting software and equipment (such as microphones). The Chairs may delegate those roles to some of the participants, especially if they are involved in the topic.

When adjusting agendas ensure the required participants can adjust to new times and be mindful of the impacts on remote participants.

The facilitator should take into account anything about the room setup that causes any participant to not be able to see or hear other participants well, or to not be heard by other participants – those in the same room as well as those who are remote.

The meeting organizer should ensure meeting facilitators know how to escalate if issues arise (venue, health rules, accessibility, CEPC, etc.).

Prepare your agenda

Getting your agenda right is the most effective way to have a smooth meeting. It allows participants to prepare in advance, focus on a limited set of topics, ensure progress, and accommodate timezone constraints for required remote participants. The Group Chairs are expected to provide an agenda of the meeting in advance.

Organize the timing around your agenda items and consider working in smaller groups:

  • not all agenda items require everyone to be there
  • smaller groups/breakouts means better timezone management
  • require reports from the smaller groups

Don’t expect to cover everything within one or two days: not all items may make it to a face-to-face meeting. Favor items that require a non-remote meeting (eg whiteboard), based on in-room participation. Otherwise organize dedicated remote meetings for the other agenda items.

Consider video pre-recordings for agenda items that need to present background. You’ll save meetings time and make it easier for remote participants. Short videos increase the chances of the videos being viewed.

Allow participants to easily raise potential agenda items (using GitHub labels “agenda+”, markdown file, or wiki pages). Gather participant attendance expectation for each agenda item (who must be there to discuss an item?) and organize based on in-room and remote timezones.

Plan and prepare your agenda to be flexible to potentially changing logistics, for instance, presenters or participants to plan to attend in person but get a positive Covid test on pre-check and need to switch to remote participation, or planned venues that become unavailable at the last minute.

Publish your detailed agenda with times and include both local (to the in-person participants) time and UTC.

Managing breaks/social activity

Allow for breaks by providing a variety of social environments for remote participants, relevant to the size of the group, and interest. Consider doing a social gatherings that are inclusive of remote participants

  • Consider having a central list of ideas of events that are easy to put together, easy to make inclusive/accessible, and easy to do in hybrid mode
  • What suggestions can we offer for self-organized social rooms (e.g. repurposing breakout tools (gather.town, wonder.me, …)?

Ensure that multiple people involved in convening the event are well-informed and experienced on using relevant features of video-conferencing platform, such as self-organizing break-out rooms, and that there is technical back-up readily available

Managing the queue

Chairs, please make sure to actively manage the queue, preferably using the tools the group has been accustomed to using for virtual meetings. Be explicit about which tools will be used and how, especially if more than one tool is necessary simultaneously (e.g. irc and video conference hand-raising).

  • Pay careful attention to requiring the in-person participants to use and respect the queue.
  • Prevent queue interruptions. The conversation moves forward based on the queue, not on the loudest participant in the room.
  • The chairs should use the queue themselves for comments that are not directly about the chair function.
  • Ask participants to mute unless they have the floor.
  • Split the queue into sub-topics if needed, to facilitate follow-ups on individual comments.

Equipment

Plan from scratch what equipment you need to really do hybrid well, e.g., large screen(s) and good tech crew at the hub(s); and reliable set-ups for the remote folks.

Have a short set of instructions on how to operate the equipment.

Know who your on-site support folk are.

Get your audio/video right

Sharing of accessible content via the web should be strongly preferred over screen sharing. This allows all participants to adjust their view of the shared content according to their own needs; the number of windows on their screen, the font size, even the location in the content that they are viewing. When it is necessary to use a presenter’s screen to convey information to the meeting it is essential that the remote meeting platform seamlessly capture the presenter’s screen content, whether that is accomplished by running a meeting client on the presenter’s device or by connecting a video feed from the presenter’s device into the meeting platform via an external means.

Consider unfortunate contingencies like the tech doesn’t work as expected or the physical meeting room(s) getting disconnected from the net or having a fire alarm – and all of these things and more have indeed happened, so think carefully about contingency planning. Will (should?) those in the room continue to meet while they’re disconnected from the net? Will the (other) remote participants continue to meet while those in the meeting room are milling about in a parking lot waiting for the fire department? Will remote participants already have fall-back channel info? How will the partitioned meeting know that it has been partitioned?

discuss emergency logistics more generally, and the fact that most of them will eventually happen.

JB: ;)

Essential to have a fall-back video conference option that can be activitied.

  • Put your remote participants on a large display in the meeting room. Maybe one screen for spotlighting and another for gallery. The gallery images should be as close to life-size as feasible.
  • Give your remote participants a “gist” camera view of the whole room. Need at least two cameras in the room; one for gist of the room and one for the person speaking. the remote participants need to be able to see the room. (High value addition that Pluto arranged in Seattle IDIW Workshop)
  • Make sure everyone can be heard clearly in the room and remotely
  • We need to recommend specific AV tech/requirements (specific enough for orders to be placed with an A/V contractor). Can W3C offer a travelling kit that team contacts can bring to their meetings? What kind of constraints can we put on the host?
  • Pay particular attention to positioning of cameras, screen, and microphones – especially when communication accommodations including captioning and/or interpreting are in use. Note that the position of the microphone(s) is very likely to need to be separate from the camera view(s).
  • If your agenda includes parallel breakout sessions, make plans in advance for supporting those for remote participants.
  • Make sure everyone can be seen. Room participants should consider using their own laptop video for remote participants to have a direct view of them. (note this will dramatically increase bandwidth consumption). Encourage all participants to turn on their video, at a minimum when they are speaking, to allow for non-verbal queues
  • Remember that not all presenters or participants, regardless of whether in room or remote, can see who is in the room or what is being projected
  • Be cautious about adding tools that may not be familiar to all participants, especially if interoperability with key tools such as assistive technologies might be a problem.
  • Take your minutes online, for everyone to see in realtime
  • If slides are presented, everyone MUST be able to read them – particularly discourage screen sharing unless the document(s) are also available on the web; screen sharing should only be used as a way to keep everyone in sync as to what material you are discussing. Make sure the slides meet WCAG 2.1 AA and “How to Make your Presentations Accessible.”
  • Make sure any tools you use, such as virtual whiteboards, are accessible to all participants. If a whiteboard is used, the view must not be blocked from any participant in the room, and must be available to all remote participants.
  • Consider training for your participants on to use the realtime collaboration tools (such as unmuting quickly)
  • When the platform supports it, pin key windows in place – speaker, content, interpreter, captions – etc….
  • Open your remote video room 30 minutes prior to the start of the meeting, to make sure everyone is ready
  • Request to test the video/audio room setting in advance to avoid bad surprises
  • Offer to test the participants settings in advance
  • do NOT make video recordings or screen captures without the explicit consent of the participants.

@@how do one get the explicit consent if the individual joined late and missed the disclaimer before the start of the recording? A: ensure that the video tool is clearing indicating that it is recording, and add a reminder with agendas. A’ provide an agenda template that includes a boilerplate notice.

Tooling & Support

@@@provide some tooling recommendation. See also https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/435 for ongoing Process CG discussion, https://github.com/w3c/guide/issues/78 in the Continuity conversation, and https://github.com/w3c/AB-memberonly/issues/30 in the AB rules/best-practices for tools discussion.

?Are there any unique requirements or desiderata for the new group calendar system to support hybrid meetings?

(for training) For subgroups, Chairs should create multiple events

References

W3C, Tooling and Archiving for Discussions and Publications, W3C Process Document https://www.w3.org/policies/process/#tooling

Frish & Greene, What It Takes to Run a Great Hybrid Meeting, Harvard Business Review, June 3, 2021 https://hbr.org/2021/06/what-it-takes-to-run-a-great-hybrid-meeting

Henry et al, How to Make Your Presentations Accessible to All, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
https://www.w3.org/WAI/teach-advocate/accessible-presentations/

Hollier et al, Accessibility of Remote Meetings, W3C Working Group Editor’s Draft
https://w3c.github.io/apa/remote-meetings/

Hooijberg & Watkins, When Does It Make Sense to Have Mixed-Mode Meetings?, MIT Sloan Management Review, August 25, 2021
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/when-does-it-make-sense-to-have-mixed-mode-meetings/

Rintel et al, Hybrid meetings guide, The New Future of Work, Microsoft Research, September 9, 2021
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/hybrid-meetings-guide/

W3C (various), Remote Meetings, W3C public wiki, 2013-2014
https://www.w3.org/wiki/Remote_Meetings

Related content

This document lives in GitHub, where changes can be tracked and pull requests are welcome. Feedback and comments are welcome. Please use GitHub issues.