Community Calls engagement 🚀

[ghost]

What we observe in Community Calls is that there's not really an incentive to participate.
People join the Calls but there's no retention.

Why could this be?

• Recordings: People will listen to the recording afterwards. This is good to inform but harms engagement.
• Program: There's too little room for speech, moderators talk too much. It lacks interactivity.
• Privacy: The calls aren't encrypted and people dox themselves when they use their voice.
• Language: This goes along with the recording of the event but I believe many aren't comfortable to speak in public, often in a foreign language.

For these points the evolution of the [Green Room] is a great initiative, let's improve on that with this thread.

What are your obstacles to participate and how do you see the solution or do you have a solution to someone else's obstacle?

[IstoraMandiri]

I was thinking we could do a roll call and invite everyone to say hello at the start if they want to.

For what it's worth I am also very much hoping that the calls can become more interactive. I don't want it tot turn into a podcast.

[TheCrowbill]

Here is my problem in a nutshell: bandwidth.

I am rural and therefore far behind the curve regarding access to affordable high-quality ISPs. My choices are 3g/4g cellular data with spotty connectivity or satellite-based. I have access to both but primarily use the satellite ISP (ViaSAT).

Unfortunately, ViaSAT is a poor choice for live-streamed events due to its inherent high latency (often >1000ms) and frequently throttled bandwidth. Currently, early evening weekday, Speedtest returns download 0.23Mb/sec, upload 0.38Mb/sec, and ping 940ms. It is embarrassing.

The cellular service suffers from frequent disconnects so is of even less use in a streaming situation.

I am not certain, but would not be surprised to learn that this problem is not uncommon and that many would-be participants are hesitant due to the same low-quality ISP service from which I suffer.

ISDN cable modem envy is a thing. The struggle is real.

I am going to try my best to participate in tomorrow's ETCCC but likely will have some issue or another. Twitter spaces limitations will put me using the 3g/4g cell tower data which means I may disconnect often. Please bear with me should that be the case.