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I feel video conferencing is a sidetrack. It is an approximation of a physical meeting that never captures the spirit of the real thing and prevents us from mov

• aantix 6y ago
  Yac Chat. Async audio messages, optional desktop record with high quality transcription to make knowledge searchable.
• zucker42 6y ago
  I fundamentally disagree. The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives. Asynchronous communication has its place, and it's amazing what has been accomplished over the LKML and similar. Software projects tend to make this sort of communication ideal, since they are amenable to individualized contributions. But the prescription that efficient digital communication must be asynchronous and textual is incorrect.
  • n3storm 6y ago
    I disagree. The reason is that some people is not educated in async or just lazy. It takes just one person that refuses to go async to make everybody use video. I heard it thousand of times: "let me call you cause I explain better by phone" No, you don't. You just use many resources to keep conversation going until you find terms and produce proper phrases. You could perfectly have elaborated this by your own and wrote it down in an email or chat group. Sorry this was deep inside me and had to come out :D
    • t0mas88 6y ago
      I have the exact opposite observation: In my company developers/engineers over use chat (in this case Slack) and email compared to other groups which causes unnecessarily long discussions. It's great that it's async, it works very well for simple factual information, but it doesn't work for topics where not everyone agrees. Those drag out over time, and cause a lot of misunderstandings, while a short standup meeting or video call would have solved it in less time. And simple factual information belongs in good documentation, not being asked in Slack as a crutch and then claim "but it's searchable"
      • ryukafalz 6y ago
        I’m not sure I’d call Slack async, it’s somewhere between async and slow synchronous. There’s a cultural expectation in many places that you respond to Slack messages ASAP that I’ve never experienced using email.
    • noahdesu 6y ago
      I can sympathize with this take. Although I'm generally fine with either async or sync--whichever is most efficient--it seems that individuals don't usually know which is right for them.
    • kbutler 6y ago
      That's only for single message info-dumps or single query-response. If I need to tell you something, it will save your time if I distill it. But note that it may be more efficient overall to do it by voice, or maybe my time actually is more valuable than your time. (or vice versa). If we're doing it interactively, I can verify your comprehension and limit my need to elaborate, saving us both time. And if we need back-and-forth collaboration, interactive is likely to be much better than multiple interruptions and context switches. My general rule is, if it's going to be more than 2 back-and-forth exchanges, do a voice call. And waiting while someone types a response is pure waste.
    • togume 6y ago
      One important factor that this statement doesn't take into account is that you can only approximate understanding what the other person is going to understand when they read what you expressed. This becomes harder when it's more than one person receiving the message.
  • atoav 6y ago
    I work as IT-Support for a university and during the last months I mainly had to do with video conferencing both on and off work (a person living in my household still studies and they have been in conferences as well). My feeling is: video conferencing took hold for two main reasons (in the university context): 1. It is the most straightforward continuation of whatever existed before (those who talk, talk and those who listen, listen) 2. People have desire for beeing close with others However in terms of efficiency, I noticed that the raw educational value of some (often 4h+ long) meetings could have been summarized by watching a well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF, if one were to skip all the chitchat and pointless hollow remarks. In terms of information density the seemingly unlimited nature of video conferencing doesn't work out well in practise (especially if paired with people who like to hear themselves speak). Most of our educators are certainly not happy with what it does to the way they have to teach (less interactivity — anything other than a 3-way conversation is nearly impossible, the rest has to be passive). They say it leads to more frontal and less communicative education. As musician, artist and programmer i know async collaborations and projects — the best stuff was always a combination of sync and async. This is why I tend to recommend to our educators to view video conferences not as the replacement for their usual seminars, but as part of a strategic mix with synchronous (video conferences) and asynchronous components (email, collaborative text editing, etc).
    • Larrikin 6y ago
      In my experience with the many educational services and communities that do summarize the important content, if you do simply read/listen to the hyper condensed version of 4+ hours a week of lecture you will most likely need to spend that same amount of time saved reviewing to absorb the material if it is anything past the most basics. What the most basics are will vary between people but at a certain point in your learning the time spent thinking about what you're learning simply becomes an important part of the learning process. Personally I find the "chit chat and hollow conversation" far more pleasurable than spending those hours alone reviewing notes, obviously with the caveat that most of the discussion is related to the material at hand in some way
    • draugadrotten 6y ago
      > well produced 15min video and reading a 10 page PDF, It is surprisingly difficult to create a useful 15 minute video. Go ahead and be rich if you find it easy. It takes me about 8 hours to produce 15 minutes of truly information-packed video content. And it is not as re-usable as you think. > if one were to skip all the chitchat Many people need the social chitchat to feel OK. It is not a negative side of video conferencing, it is added value.
  • rwmj 6y ago
    > The reason synchronous video communication continues to dominate is because it's more information dense than text in many situations, and more interactive than asynchronous alternatives. You really don't join the kind of video conferences I'm called into, where an hour long meeting might easily have been done in a few minutes by email.
    • giancarlostoro 6y ago
      In my opinion if you have a meeting where a few people talk to thousands in a company you're better served by sending everybody a static video and allowing for Q/A via email. Every time I hear about meetings that could of been emails I can't help but think somebody's trying to justify their jobs. Edit: Typo, and on a sidenote, I'm glad I hear about these sorta meetings from others, my boss does his best to keep us out of useless cruft.
  • ptato 6y ago
    > video communication [...] is more information dense than text this has never been my experience. group meetings devolve into explaining the same thing in many different ways, for every item that is discussed.
  • monkeydust 6y ago
    Agree on information density - I am finding also that conference calls (internally) are getting shorted. 1hr was norm, then 30mins now 15min catchups are in place. I actually like this - can work if both parties are like minded - a lot of information can be exchanged this way in 15min. Obviously does not leave much time for 'small talk' though, which for me is good.
• bamboozled 6y ago
  People keep sprucing this at work: “We need to be async only yada yada. It’s how the Linux kernel is developed” We do that until our projects are late or we have an outage, then it’s just endless synchronous calls until we get our smug on again. Just have both in moderation.
  • tonyarkles 6y ago
    I have been a fan off the IETF Draft and RFC process for a long time, and recently started looking at the tools they use for that process. It’s mostly async, naturally. BUT, they do have in-person (virtual this time around) big gatherings every quarter or so. I have no idea what fraction of contributors go to these meetings, but it seems like it would only have to be some small critical mass for the ideas and discussions at those in-person meetings to spread to the broader community. It’s a model I’m thinking about quite a bit lately given how distracting I’ve been finding a lot of IM/chat apps lately. I’m with you, both forms in moderation, and ideally with the sync stuff concentrated into reasonably-sized reasonably-spaced chunks.
• jodrellblank 6y ago
  > "The real power of digital communication is that it is searchable" The Library of Congress has ~38 million books in it. Imagine you could search it, it's easy to say that would make it more useful. And it probably would for some people - but a human has very little processing power and slow reading speed, if you got 38 million books reduced to 1,000 context-free paragraphs, that's still too many to read through. This leaves "search" as a tool for limited situations such as: You remember roughly who put the content there and when and close-enough exactly what it said. Often in this situation that's still not enough to find it. Or, you want something popular like "iTunes Store Login" or "$Restaurant opening times". Or you are a researcher/archeologist. Outside those kinds of usecases, "it's searchable" is more of a tragedy of the commons style problem - people who are best placed to do it (those making decisions) don't want to do it, and offload the problem to everyone else saying "it's searchable". This leaves decisions, documentation, and history scattered over an ever-increasing wasteland and intermingled with countless book-equivalent-volumes of chat, jokes, memes, flamewars, "donuts in the breakroom" trivia, outdated status updates, and all sorts. Slogging through 1,000 paragraphs from the Library of Congress search results is still possible. Increasingly, every move is dogged by the weight of "search the 10,000 GitHub issues and read all the screens and screens of backlog" and "search the mailing list archives", the Slack archives, the IRC archives, the email threads, the forum threads, skim-reading junk and junk and junk, only to have to do it again 5 minutes later when your boss says "what was the status of X project?" and 20 minutes later when your coworker says "any reason X was changed?" and 10 minutes later when you want to know if X library should be behaving this way or not. "Do nothing and let the search be our panacea" has always won over "big-organize up front" but it should be clear to everyone by now that Google search results get worse year on year. Nature lets things rot, unless you put maintenance effort in to keep them. We burn some money and a LOT of people's time keeping junk by default, on the "it might come in useful oneday" principle that leads to hoarder houses. We act as if data can't cause disease and can't attract cockroaches, but ignore the fact that it piles up, clutters things up, gets in the way, it's the arterial plaque, the drainpipe sludge, the rust, of computer systems. The power of digital communication is space travel - it's possible for people far away to be involved, and time travel - people who weren't there see what happened. "Searchable" is the Siren's call, that's not its power, that's its road to Hell paved with good intentions.
• Angostura 6y ago
  You should look at Microsoft Teams & Streams. Yuo can record your video conference, it produces a reasonable automated transcript which is searchable, letting people easily jump to the relevant part of the meeting.
• quietbritishjim 6y ago
  There is a problem with asynchronous text-based communication that doesn't happen with synchronous voice-based communication: I often write (or feel the need to write) text like this: > I'm not sure what you meant by "blargh". If you meant foo then [long explanation, probably with bullet points]. If you meant bar then [a different long explanation]. This isn't an efficient use of either of our time. Also, if the explanation was already a bit intimidating (in terms of amount of content) then double that is even worse, even if half of it is actually irrelevant. The alternative is that I ask what they meant by "blargh" but often the response doesn't get the heart of the difference, probably because the difference is subtle enough they didn't realise there was one in the first place. So it takes a few messages to sort out, by which point the whole conversation has dragged on for a few extra hours precisely because the communication is asynchronous so messages aren't replied to instantly by either of us, which is distracting us (or me, at least!) for that long. In a conversation where there's likely to be some ambiguities in what you're saying, it's just much faster and less wasteful to iterate your joint understanding with a synchronous conversation. I often have highly technical conversations that are like this, but it's probably true even of lots of non-technical conversations. Of course what I've said is mostly true of one to one conversations. But depending on the nature of a meeting, often lots of these happen between pairs of people in the meeting.
  • neutronicus 6y ago
    I've worked with some people from whom you simply cannot get answers to multiple questions through e-mail. You get one sentence addressing the simplest interpretation of the simplest interrogative clause across the body of the message and as far as they're concerned it's off their to-do list. For these people I need to physically impose my presence (or at least heavy breathing over audio) to elicit the minutes of time spent on task required to obtain the information I need.
    • brianmcc 6y ago
      Yes! There are people you can send a numbered list of questions - 5, even 10 - and get a structured, definitive response from them in return, and your task is done. And there are people you just can't collaborate with in that way - you'll never get back what you need.
• bitxbit 6y ago
  This is something I’ve been working on the side for over a decade. A big part of the hurdle is in technologies. Just not there in terms of achieving this in a usable format.
• MR4D 6y ago
  Try a big screen at hi resolution and stereo. It changes the experience. And by big, I mean 40+ inches and resolution of 1080p or greater. If you’ve ever tried it, you’ll see how incredible videoconferencing can actually be. It’s as different of an experience as Wolfenstein 3D was from the previous 2D map version. Totally different.
  • kbutler 6y ago
    While I haven't tried it with current video conferencing solutions, I did a lot of meetings with that setup conference room to conference room years ago, and I don't recall it being significantly better.
    • MR4D 6y ago
      That’s because it’s in a conference room. Having that setup in your office next to a desk is like talking to the person in the cube next to you. Really weird the first time because the person is not really there, but you behave like they are. It’s a virtual window looking into the office miles away. FYI, helps to have it to the side of you instead of in front of you for best results, so that it’s like sitting beside someone.