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Using Google Hangouts On Air to stream a keynote

Monday, July 2nd, 2012 by Adrian Segar

On May 7, 2012 Google opened up Google Hangouts On Air (HOA)—a free service for broadcasting and recording live video with up to 10 participants—to all Google+ users. Six weeks later, the night before edACCESS 2012 started at the Peddie School in New Jersey, I decided to try using Google Hangouts On Air to stream and then archive the conference keynote. A couple of edACCESS old-timers who couldn’t attend in person this year had asked me if there was any way we could stream any of the “public” conference sessions. I had nothing to lose by trying out this new technology.

Here’s what I did, what I learned, and how things turned out.

Google Hangouts On Air preparation
First I created an empty Google+ Circle and went through the process of creating a test Hangout On Air. This allowed me to get familiar with the process and check in advance for any potential problems. I was able to successfully view myself streaming, and see how the stream turned into a YouTube video once I ended the Hangout. This gave me the confidence to announce through social media channels that the stream would be available. (Though I neglected to figure out how to provide a link to the stream in advance).

Peddie’s charming and efficient Director of Academic Technology provided a laptop with a decent external webcam and we circled each other on Google+ so I could add her computer to the hangout on the morning of the keynote. (Important note: you cannot invite people to a hangout unless they’ve added you to one of their circles first.) I decided to use her computer to stream video and audio of the keynote speaker, and my trusty 17″ MacBook Pro with built in webcam to setup the hangout and publicize and monitor the feed.

To broadcast Hangouts on Air you must have a linked and verified YouTube account associated with your Google login. This linked account will be where the broadcast stream, and later the video recording will appear. You only need to set up this linkage once, but I strongly suggest you do so (and test it) before your first HOA. Verification is apparently necessary if you want to save a hangout that lasts longer than fifteen minutes!

Showtime!
Ten minutes before the keynote was due to begin I started a hangout in the usual way by clicking on the START A HANGOUT button on the Google+ hangouts tab. Then I added Emily to the invitee list, named the hangout, checked the option “Enable Hangouts On Air” (and agreed to the warning dialog), and clicked the Hang out button. This led to a normal-looking hangout window, with the addition of an Embed link and a Start Broadcast button at the top right.

Once Emily accepted my invitation, we were nearly good to go. The big picture feed in a hangout is switched to the webcam with the loudest audio. I wanted to avoid having the stream switch away from Emily’s webcam so I muted the microphone on my computer by hovering over my small video window at the bottom and clicking on the microphone icon.

But I still needed to share a link to the stream so that anyone could watch. Clicking the Embed link on the Hangout page I obtained the embed code for the stream and quickly created a blog post with the embedded keynote stream. This embedded a YouTube player onto the page. Visitors could watch the live Hangout On Air directly from the page, as well as on Google+ and my YouTube channel. (Note: once the broadcast is over, this link points automatically to the resulting YouTube video post.) I checked the blog page to ensure the video looked OK before we went live. Then I tweeted the page link to the blog page.

[Later I discovered that when the hangout is starting, if you right-click on the timestamp of the Google+ post that announces the hangout you will also get a link to the stream.]

We were ready!

By this time the speaker was being introduced. I clicked the Start Broadcast button and we went live.

While hosting the hangout on my computer I could watch the broadcast stream, delayed by 5-10 seconds, in another browser window. Pretty cool! I also noticed that an updating count of stream viewers was displayed on the hangout page. Also cool!

After a few minutes I realized that seeing my face at the bottom of the hangout was distracting, so I turned off my camera.

Then I received a tweet from my friend Ruud Janssen in Switzerland(!) who was watching. He asked if I could use my camera to show the slides as the main video, moving the video of the speaker to a small window at the bottom of the screen. This made sense, so I turned my laptop round, pointed it at the slide screen, and clicked on its window to make the slides the main video for the stream. This worked well. (I should have thought of this earlier. Next time I will explore using a tool like CamTwist to pipe presenter slides directly into a hangout feed.)

Unlike a regular hangout, where any participant can override the camera switching that Google normally does, the main window for a Hangout On Air is either determined automatically from the webcam with the loudest audio or by the person streaming the hangout. So I became the camera operator. When the speaker asked for and answered questions, I chose Emily’s webcam. When he began speaking again, I returned to the slides as the main video.

We had no audience microphone, so I asked the speaker to repeat audience questions. That allowed stream followers to hear questions and they’d be included on the final YouTube video. Next time we could add a small netbook webcam to the hangout and have a volunteer run it round as a mike (and video) for audience questions.

When the keynote was over I simply clicked End broadcast. After about ten minutes, a recorded video of the 105 minute hangout automatically posted to my YouTube channel as well as the post on my Google+ Page, and the embed post on my blog. At this point I was able to edit the video information on YouTube. Now it appeared in my YouTube Channel with the same title I had given the hangout. Apparently you can use YouTube’s tools to edit the video itself, but I didn’t do this.

Conclusion
Broadcasting this impromptu stream only required a small amount of preparation. Upon completion the stream automatically turns into a standard permanent YouTube video. The ease and quality of the result pleases me. Sure, it’s not a professional broadcast and recording. But for the cost (free!) and minimal effort required, Google Hangouts On Air provides an attractive solution for streaming and archiving events that will fill many needs. I recommend you try out this approach for a low-profile event.

Tips and resources for Google Hangouts On Air
Here are a couple of useful tips from a longer list of Hangouts On Air tips by Fraser Cain:

– You can join a Hangout twice from two different devices. This will let you put up screenshots, videos, etc in another pane.
– Create an intro screen graphic beforehand that introduces the Hangout. Run this in your hangout for the first 5 minutes before you start.

And here are two useful resource guides for learning more about Hangouts On Air:
Hangouts On Air Technical Guide <pdf>
Google+ support page for Hangouts On Air

Got any questions? I’ll try to answer them if I can. Have you run a Google Hangout On Air for an event? Share your experience here!

Tags: cameras, ff0000, Google, hangout, keynote, multiple, presentation, streaming| Posted in Event design, NoRepost, Presentations | 26 Comments »

Testing consensus using Roman voting

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Here’s part 2 of The Right (Way) To Vote series – posts on voting at events. It covers testing consensus using Roman voting. Feel free to read Part 1, on hand and stand voting.

How should groups make decisions? Common answers to this question include “by voting” or “by discussion and then the boss gets to decide.” But what if we want a decision method that provides consensus, or as near consensus as we can get?

An individual making a decision may agonize over it. But when more than one person is involved, the decision-making process can turn into an argument. So groups need a way to test their agreement, discuss concerns, and arrive at a decision that all can support.

Forcing a yes/no vote about a proposal hides the degree of support for the resulting vote. Sometimes the level of enthusiasm for a decision is tepid, or a minority of those voting are adamantly opposed. Serious problems can surface later when it’s time for implementation.

A better approach is to publicly discover the degree of consensus about a proposal. If doubts or opposition are uncovered, addressing them is possible before a final decision is adopted.

Testing consensus using Roman voting

My favorite solution for gauging the strength of consensus is Roman voting, as described by Esther Derby in Self-facilitation Skills for Teams:

The Romans indicated their will in the gladiator’s arena with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. A modern modification of Roman voting helps groups arrive at a decision.

Thumbs-up = “I support this proposal.”

Thumbs-sideways = “I’ll go along with the will of the group.”

Thumbs-down = “I do not support this proposal and wish to speak.”

If all thumbs are down, eliminate the option. On a mixed vote, listen to what the thumbs-down people have to say, and recheck agreement. Be cautious about choosing an option if the majority are thumbs-sideways: This option has only lukewarm support.

This technique generates consensus. Consensus doesn’t necessarily mean complete unanimity. Consensus means that everyone must be willing to support the idea, even if it’s not his personal first choice.

Sooner or later, you’ll have a situation where one person withholds support for any option. Manage this situation before it happens. At the start of the consensus process, set a time limit:

“We’ll work really hard to reach consensus until the end of this meeting. If we don’t have agreement by that time, we will turn the decision over to _________, or take a vote, or __________ (a technical expert, coach, manager) will decide.”

Most people don’t hold out to be obstinate; they are responding to a deeply held value or belief. Often the lone holdout will move on, but not at the cost of relinquishing an important belief. Respect the belief, use your fallback decision-making method, and move forward. However, when a group seldom reaches consensus but instead relies on voting or deferring to authority, it’s a sign there are deeper issues at play.

Silence when someone asks, “Do we all agree?” does not signal consensus! Instead, try testing consensus using Roman voting. Do you test consensus on decisions made at your meetings?

Photo attribution: Flickr user vegaseddie

Tags: consensus, hand voting, Roman, voting| Posted in Event design | 15 Comments »

Should we fire the icebreaker?

Monday, June 25th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Should we fire the icebreaker?

Paul Z Jackson, President of the Applied Improvisation Network, recently wrote about a great discussion of icebreakers that’s been running for four years on the AIN website:

“There’s a fascinating discussion on our website about whether to call activities with which we begin workshops ‘icebreakers’, ‘energizers’, warm-ups’ or something else. Whatever we call them carries assumptions – such as assuming there is ice in the room that needs to be broken.

Paul Levy suggested we might name such activities as ‘zoning-in’ or ‘confidence builders’. As improvisers, we take collaboration and co-construction seriously, and so we can expect our assumptions to have a significant impact on what happens. If we start a conversation in which people look for ‘ice’ or ‘resistance’ or other concepts which may prove unhelpful, we’ll assuredly find them.

If we start a conversation in which people look for ‘best hopes’, ‘useful resources’, ‘interesting similarities and differences with each other’, then we’ll find those. It’s a simple application of ‘yes… and’, where our offer is for constructive and useful qualities that will serve the session well.”
—Paul Z Jackson, President, Applied Improvisation Network

The whole discussion is well worth reading. Some of the participants make the case that perhaps naming whatever we do at the opening of an event is best avoided. I’m sympathetic to that. When we name something we often end up unwittingly restricting its power and influence. And yet, when marketing what we do we sometimes need to provide a name, something that is meaningful to a potential client. It’s a quandary. But a good one to have.

Should we fire the icebreaker? What do you think?

Photo attribution: Flickr user by_invisiblekid

Tags: icebreakers, improv| Posted in Event design | 3 Comments »

The right (way) to vote – part 1

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

The right way to vote

When and how did you first learn to vote? Probably in school by raising your hand. This time-honored method of polling an audience may seem straightforward, but I frequently see presenters who don’t use this simple participation technique correctly. Here’s how to do it right.

Make sure you list all the possible choices you’re offering before you poll. If you’re asking an “only-one-of-these-answers-is-right” question, providing all options in advance helps to reduce the natural hesitation to pick the early “correct” answer when you haven’t heard all the alternatives.
Next, ask if the alternatives you’re giving are clear and complete, and give the audience a chance to clarify the choices you’ve provided or incorporate additional potential answers you’ve overlooked.
Now it’s time to ask for a show of hands. Remember that because you’re at the front of the room you can see the response better than anyone in the audience except, perhaps, the people in the back row. It’s frustrating for audience members to take the trouble to vote and not be informed of the group’s response. Present each answer in turn and give people time to respond. After each answer, estimate the proportion of the audience that has hands raised and give that feedback to the audience, e.g. “About half of you prefer bacon.”

Yes-No voting with no abstentions

If you need a yes-no vote with abstaining not an option, use stand voting. Ask everyone in favor/agreement to stand. (If any audience member is unable to stand, have them raise their hand.) Then say “Everyone standing sit, everyone sitting stand.” If you’re looking for unanimity, ask anyone now standing to explain what they feel they can’t commit to, and, if necessary, the group can work on an agreement as to how to proceed.

In part 2 of this post, I’ll describe another right way to vote: Roman voting.

Tags: hand voting, voting| Posted in Presentations | No Comments »

Stream of Brad Rathgeber keynote at edACCESS 2012 on online learning

Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Brad Rathgeber’s keynote at edACCESS 2012 on online learning

Posted in Learning, NoRepost | No Comments »

How to gauge the energy for creating a new conference

Monday, June 18th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could know whether a great idea would lead to successfully creating a new conference?

Creating a new conference is a chancy business that requires a certain amount of guts. I have worked on several conference projects that haven’t panned out. Failing to engage a critical mass of registrants for an event that you thought would be popular is a disheartening experience.

Despite success in creating many successful new conferences over the last thirty years, I still don’t know how to predict whether an event will be viable. But I have learned one thing.

One requirement for success is being able to easily find others—my rule of thumb is at least four people—who share your vision for the conference and are willing to help make the event a reality. In the past, I’ve tried to gauge commitment intuitively. While rereading Peter Block’s wonderful book Community: The Structure of Belonging with my Consultants and Trainers monthly network group (now in its 27th year!) I came across his Four Early Questions, which he uses to negotiate the social contract between group members to “shift the ownership of the room”. Peter suggests asking people to rate on a seven-point scale, from low to high, their responses to these four questions:

How valuable an experience (or project, or community) do you plan for this to be?
How much risk are you willing to take?
To what extent are you invested in the well-being of the whole?
How participative do you plan to be?

When building any kind of new endeavor, I think these questions provide a useful way to learn more about the people you may be working with. So I’m sharing them with you here.

Tags: new conference, Peter Block, questions| Posted in Event design | No Comments »

Knowledge … you’ve come a long way, baby!

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Do conference sessions have to be serious to be authoritative? Must sharing knowledge be a dull affair?

There was a time when the wisdom was that a speaker should start with a joke to relax his (invariably his) audience. Thereafter, relaxation achieved, the remainder of the talk would be deadly serious, saturating the audience with the extent and depth of his knowledge.

There was a time when knowledge came in encyclopedias and was communicated by the pronouncements of authorities. It was essentially immutable, occasionally updated, and a reassuringly solid basis for our worldview.

Or so we believed.

Today we are starting to see that learning no longer resides neatly in our books, computers, or brains as a discrete collection of clear, unambiguous facts and theories. Learning has become a networked multi-brain entity, born in the gestalt of a group, not an individual. And, charmingly, as David Weinberger says, it has taken on a quintessential human characteristic.

Knowledge has lightened up.

Here’s David:

“…the only knowledge that is dead serious is in the posts that emulate prior forms. The article in an online scientific journal is likely to be very much like articles in printed scientific journals, but the post on the same topic perhaps by the same scientist on her blog is far more likely to exhibit a light touch.

…the humor of knowledge does something far more important than the trivial quip itself. It announces that the author and the reader have something more in common than their interest in the topic under discussion. It says that knowledge is not enough, that knowing is a human activity, and that humans are embedded in a shared context that is always far wider than that of any particular topic…

…Knowledge is funny on the Web because humor expresses the truth about the world within which knowledge makes sense, and the truth about the inevitable humanity of knowledge itself.”
—David Weinberger, KMWorld Magazine, Why is the Web so funny?

Humorizing learning humanizes it, and we should celebrate this truth. Knowledge is no longer something that can be shoved into discrete categories and made subservient to our theories about the world. Rather, it has been liberated, finally able to take its rightful place as an integral component of human culture.

Knowledge … you’ve come a long way, baby!

Tags: David Weinberger, humor, knowledge, web| Posted in Learning | No Comments »

Is “learning” a dirty word to management?

Monday, June 4th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

Is “learning” a dirty word to management?

“I rarely use the word learning these days. Business managers hear learning and think schooling and don’t want to invest a dime in it. I’m tired of having doors slammed in my face, so I now talk about Working Smarter. I’ve yet to meet a manager who didn’t want her organization to work smarter (even though learning is a major component of doing so).”
—Bringing Informal Learning Up To Date, by Jay Cross

Given Jay’s experience, it surprises me how often people ask me how to justify attending participant-driven conferences that don’t have a nice neat program of sessions to show to the “I-decide-whether-you-go” boss. I’d like to think that managers are able to:

trust their employees possess the inclination and ability to learn what they need to know to do their job better.
be enthusiastic about conferences that effectively leverage the combined knowledge and experience of all participants rather than that of a few “experts”.

Sadly, it’s clear that many managers see learning as a dirty word however their minds define it: whether as schooling/training or as just-in-time, focused, relevant peer learning. Having to recast “learning” into “Working Smarter” to get management on board reveals management with a fundamental misunderstanding of modern business realities.

The industrial age, when employees trained in a static skill set generated long-term returns, is over. Management needs to embrace this simple truth. Continuous, self-directed learning in all its forms—experiential, social, and formal—is key to sustained business success today. To paraphrase Derek Bok: if you think learning is dirty, try ignorance.

Have you experienced push-back from management when you’re making a case for learning? Do tell!

Photo attribution: Flickr user happeningfish

Tags: Jay Cross, Learning, management, managers, working smarter| Posted in leadership, Learning | 1 Comment »

Give me a break!

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

In 2011, the organizers of a large European conference invited me to give a forty-minute presentation. When I arrived and saw the conference program I was surprised to see that the day’s sessions were scheduled with NO intervening breaks. Participants were somehow expected to instantaneously teleport between session rooms—even restroom visits were apparently not on the agenda. As you might expect, I lost ten minutes of my forty-minute time slot because of this elementary scheduling error. No breaks between meeting sessions!

Most event planners won’t make this kind of mistake, but, given that breaks between sessions should be longer than zero minutes, how long should they be? The answer depends on several factors:

The time needed to move between sessions held in different locations
The overall length of the event
The amount of participation and interaction designed into sessions

In my book Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love I describe an event where, at the last minute, we were forced to schedule sessions in two buildings that were separated by a ten-minute outdoor walk. Scheduled program breaks weren’t long enough, sessions started late, and very hot weather during the conference led to additional complaints.

How long should a break be?

At the very least, breaks must be long enough for people to

decide the session they want to attend next
figure out where the next session is
take a bathroom break if needed; and
get to their desired destination leisurely.

Even at a one-day conference with sessions held in adjacent rooms, I recommend at least ten minutes between sessions; fifteen would be better. If your rooms are further apart, or in a building that is confusing to navigate, you need to allocate more time.

Breaks between meeting sessions can be shorter at a one-day event than they need to be at a four-day event. That doesn’t mean they should be. But if you have a crowded, must-do agenda you can get away with minimum breaks for a one-day event. At longer conferences, there’s no excuse for not scheduling extended breaks, and your attendee quality of experience will suffer if you don’t. A long lunch break—at least ninety minutes, preferably two hours—and a significant break between the last session of the day and dinner is a simple way to build longer breaks into the day, but having twenty to twenty-five-minute refreshment breaks between morning sessions will also help to keep energy, participation, and learning high during a multi-day event.

Providing breaks in long sessions

Finally, the amount of participation and interaction included in sessions will influence the amount of break time needed. The opening roundtable I use at my conferences can last a couple of hours. When I first ran this session I innocently ran it with just a single midway twenty-minute refreshment break. Eventually, I noticed what an energy sink this was, and now I break up the session every twenty minutes with short participative exercises like human spectrograms and pair share introductions. A refreshment table in the room allows people to grab a drink or an apple during these frequent breaks. By using multiple short breaks, the energy level in the room now remains high.

Check out my post on the science of white space at events for more thoughts on this important, but often overlooked, topic.

Photo attribution: Flickr user jarkko

Tags: breaks, downtime, session breaks, socials, white space| Posted in Event design | 2 Comments »

Inspiring conference attendees to take action

Thursday, May 24th, 2012 by Adrian Segar

How do you inspire conference attendees to take action?

This question arose when I was facilitating Vermont Vision for a Multicultural Future, a conference addressing the challenges and opportunities of a more multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural Vermont. Conferences that tackle wide-scope topics like multiculturalism or sustainable business practices are not going to come up with definitive comprehensive solutions to the countless problems discussed. This can demoralize participants who are hungry for change or filled with a desire to “do something”.

One of two common Conferences That Work closing sessions, the personal introspective, gives attendees a chance to explore changes they may want to make in their lives and work as a result of their experiences during the conference. To address the desire for big-picture change, we pointed out at the start of the Vermont Vision introspective that many of the participants had influence in their professional lives (state government, education, law enforcement, faith community, etc.) So we asked each person to focus on what they wanted to work on in their sphere of influence.

Having supported and emphasized the need for personal change during the introspective, we moved to the group spective, the final Conferences That Work session. I often start a group spective by using plus/delta to quickly evaluate a conference. For plus/delta, participants first publicly share their positive experiences of the conference. We list them in the plus column of a flipchart or projected Google Doc.

When all positive comments have been aired, participants list the changes they would like in the delta column. This simple technique provides a quick basis for participants to share experiences. Then we move into a discussion about what the group wants to do next.

An action plus/delta

To transform plus/delta into a tool for action at Vermont Vision, I redefined the two columns as follows:

Plus ==> actions I/we want to work on

Delta ==> issues that concern me but that I don’t know how to address

This allowed us to move from the personal decisions made at the introspective into sharing, discussing, and supporting initiatives to which individuals had committed (the plus column). The delta column then allowed us to explore other ideas and who might be able to work on them.

We found that the plus column was much longer than the delta column. That was encouraging! Even though significant issues in the delta column remain to be tackled, participants came away from the session knowing that many concrete plans had been generated through our time together. Unlike the outcomes of many conferences that work on problems that seem overwhelming, participants left Vermont Vision feeling that we had built momentum around specific objectives that we had a realistic chance of achieving. Perhaps that is why every single conference evaluation asked us to hold this inaugural conference again next year!

How do you inspire conference attendees to take action? Share your thoughts!

Tags: action, diversity, plus/delta, vermont, vision| Posted in Facilitating Change | 5 Comments »