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JMP Discovery Online - What should it look like?

Jeff_Perkinson

As you've heard, JMP Discovery will be held online this fall. While this presents some challenges, it may also present some new opportunities. For example, we will be able to reach a larger audience online that we can in-person and many more presentations will be available on-demand after the conference.

We want your help and ideas about what kinds of activities and sessions should we offer as a part of the conference.

So, help us by considering some of these questions and post any ideas or thoughts you have.

How can we offer Meet the Developers?
Are presentations better pre-recorded or live?
How can we encourage networking among attendees?
What kinds of sessions benefit from being live?
How can we make our conference stand out from other online experiences?

We're open for any and all ideas.

Thanks for your time and consideration!

Accepted answers

All comments

Mark_Bailey

In general, with Zoom meetings, using Polls regularly and frequently helps increase engagement. Polls could be posted by speaker or a moderator.

Zoom meetings provide breakout rooms, too. They are meant for specific, focused activity or discussions.

We use these features in JMP training classes. We get positive feedback about them in the course evaluations.

Mark_Bailey

How can we offer Meet the Developers?

You could post a schedule for each developer / development area and have a separate meeting for each.

Are presentations better pre-recorded or live?

Live presentations are more engaging. Many viewers leave the presentation very early when they watch recordings. That is what we learned about our recording eLearning courses.

How can we encourage networking among attendees?

Zoom meeting breakout rooms for informal gathering.

What kinds of sessions benefit from being live?

All sessions. Imagine we simply set up video displays for recordings at the normal (in person) conference? How much attention would they get? It is more demanding when the whole conference is virtual. So live is the way to get and keep attention.

How can we make our conference stand out from other online experiences?

I think most attendees appreciate access to JMP staff of all kinds. Second is the networking that happens. Zoom has practically unlimited capacity, so create lots of meetings. Birds of a feather, for example. Grab something to eat and join a meeting to discuss a topic.

chuck_boiler

How can we make our conference stand out from other online experiences?

What if a customer agrees to set up a live feed from the 'shop floor' of their facility and we interview them as they talk about JMP with actual production going on in the background? Maybe even a walk around tour? Or related, the customer takes some candid video that is nicely edited, of the production process? I'm thinking a combination of the cable show 'How it's Made' but with a cool JMP analytics message. Maybe some combination of the above? In some sense, this is Discovery goes to the customer sites? Kinda thinking most manufacturing will be up and running by Fall.

chuck_boiler

Oh, and drone footage. Lots of drone footage.

dieterpisot

Some sessions might need to be recorded. Company policy might not allow some presenter to use Webex, Teams, or Zoom. Recording their sessions ahead of time might be the only option for them to participate. Recorded session allows allow for re-runs or an on-demand schedule.

For Meet the Developers it would be nice if both parties could agree to use a camera. it's so much better to see the person you are talking to than just hearing their voice.

chuck_boiler

As a part of the customer registration process, the attendee takes a picture of themselves to go with their 'virtual session ID'. These pictures are shown as a giant mosaic at some point during the conference. That mosaic is persistent and 'clickable' during the conference and somehow interactively provides information about the attendee AND a way to connect directly during the conference and after. Mark's 'ZOOM' virtual meeting room always on and always available lets attendee's direct connect and also chat about a topic of mutual interest, like a live virtual chat room. If some kind of virtual scheduler could be supported attached to the attendee calendar if might work better.

Another idea: the handheld attendee application becomes like the arms and legs for 'getting around' inside the conference information space

Jason_Wiggins

Q:How can we encourage networking among attendees?

This zoom blog has some good ideas around developing as sense of culture in a virtual environment. The section on virtual rendezvous caught my attention.

Chatting with fellow JMP users in the evening at Discovery has always been fun and valuable to me. What if we organized evening mixer groups? Bring your favorite beverage and snack to a Zoom rendezvous and talk with other JMP users. Turn your camera on show off your pets or funny backgrounds. Have JMP staff act as moderators ready with questions or anecdotes to get conversations going.

Jason_Wiggins

Somehow the link to the blog in my post is not working. Here is the full URL

https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/03/16/creating-culture-community-amid-social-distancing-work-from-home/

karencopeland

Yoga with Arati. I have been doing some zoom classes - much more fulfilling than a recorded video that you can walk away from. The trick will be figuring out the time zones...9am Cary Time so that it is at 6 or 7 out here west of the Mississippi....then sessions mid-day in Cary?

anne_milley

I think it makes sense to have some sessions pre-recorded for reasons Dieter lists as well as others: You can ensure a high-quality recording in advance and we can provide advice on what will work best, do staging calls, etc. We will know how long the talk is and the speaker still may be able to join to answer questions at the end. If there are technical difficulties with a presenter who is scheduled, you can swap out to a pre-recorded segment (not ideal, but an option to keep things moving).

martindemel

How can we offer Meet the Developers?
- I like the idea to have several slots (and more of them than in the discovery) for each of the developer's areas. This allows developers to share their time load to be active, and provide participants to enter when ever they feel to do so. One could use e.g. breakout rooms for this.
- Another idea is that participants can book slots, however this might result in full booking and others cannot participate anymore. A more open breakroom concept might be better as others might stay in the back of the person asking the question but are interested to know the answer as well.
- May have a second person write into the chat a stenograph of the question asked and may also briefly about the discussion results - that way people joining later can scan through the chat and see previously asked questions. This would provide us also plenty of blog post themes for the next months
Are presentations better pre-recorded or live?
- Pro live: as mark said, more natural conversation results in higher attention (sometimes the non-perfect sentence creates laughter we definitively want to have on the other side)
- Pro recorded: No issues with bandwidth or broken audio. If recorded than please with kind of similar interface, e.g. zoom presentation with camera on screen like you would have it live. However, why would I watch a recording I can watch later again, if in parallel there is another meeting of interest.
How can we encourage networking among attendees?
- Breakrooms around topics: platforms, application areas, problem statements, fun things - however they need to be moderated in some way so conversation got started.
- Ability to have private rooms for just a few people to chat with each other during breaks between sessions, and we need breaks between sessions
What kinds of sessions benefit from being live?
- all kinds, especially plenaries and break-outs, but also E-posters raised huge interest.
How can we make our conference stand out from other online experiences?
- If possible we need to have a kind of gong all participants can hear no matter in what (private) meeting/chat they are. The gong is part of Discovery to initiate people walking to the presentation rooms
- Keep the short introduction speech for the presenters usually done by steering committee
- we need to offer something which makes participation different from watching it as recording, like the voting of the presentations to win a prize at the end
- Make application streams in the schedule. In live discoveries quite often there is an overlap of DOE topics and people would like to see both. In a DOE stream they would be one after the other and don't overlap. Of course some topics overlap in areas, but just as suggestion: Industry stream (Semi/BioPharma/Chemical), Application Stream (DOE/EDA/Modeling/Sharing or Automation/Others)
- Have a kind of private online chat for support questions: Someone posts a question, one JMP staff member takes it and has a private chat with that person on their topic (with video/screen sharing if required)
- Have a presentation of the wish list topics and what has been implemented and what has been considered already for development. This would encourage more people to vote existing wishes and add their wishes too. This is also one key theme of the discovery and reason why we have that many developers on the Discovery Summit. And it makes people feel important as we listen to what they say.