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clowdr-app / clowdr

Midspace (formerly Clowdr) is a completely open-source virtual conference platform. Host complex events with hundreds of authors and presenters. Midspace includes automated livestreams, video chat, text chat, randomised networking and much more.
https://www.midspace.app/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Rethink "Item Rooms" (breakout vs. Q&A) #72

Closed bcpierce00 closed 3 years ago

bcpierce00 commented 3 years ago

The "Breakout Room" for a talk should be the same thing as the Q&A room, as far as participants are concerned. (Otherwise it's easy to get lost if you're looking for one but find yourself in the other! This happened to me several times.) Unifying them would also eliminate crazy rules like "Authors must go to the Q&A room at least 9 but not less that 5 minutes before their Q&A starts..."

EdNutting commented 3 years ago

In our discussion on Zoom today, we considered whether the "seemless transition" for authors moving from the end of a Q&A to async breakout is really worth having. It is nice, but forces us to expose the fact that multiple/many Q&A "backstage rooms" exist.

Alternatively, we keep the separate Q&A rooms (which are necessary for the livestreaming process) but when a Q&A ends, we redirect everyone to the (single) room associated with the item. This would allow us to hide the existence of the backstage rooms (and really make them just backstage rooms serving a single UX purpose). It would also allow us to show a single "discussion room" link from the Item page (at the moment, it is often a confusing list of multiple rooms).

bcpierce00 commented 3 years ago

My $.02: It's a bit of a shame to lose the seamless transition and introduce an extra click. especially as it will seem gratuitous to users (they've already set up their camera, so why do they need to do it again?) and introduce an opportunity for significant confusion (someone showing up to the conference 10 minutes before their talk may not understand the need for the extra click to get into the breakout room). But I must confess I don't really understand why the platform can't perform the click for them -- i.e., take them directly into the breakout room without stopping in the "antechamber"...

EdNutting commented 3 years ago

In this narrow case of 'being connected to one room and automoving to another', it might be possible. We'd need to test across browsers.

In general, it isn't possible to auto-click because browsers require camera/mic/video ops to originate from a user interaction.

rossng commented 3 years ago

We've changed this experience quite significantly now. We now have a single discussion/breakout room per item (in the UI, at least). When an event finishes, the speakers are automatically redirected from the speakers' area to that discussion room.

The transition is no longer seamless, which is covered by #167, but I think the rest of this issue is addressed.