Lessons Learned from Hybrid Meetings

Lessons I Learned While Attending a Hybrid Meeting

The approach to work has changed several times over the past three or so years. We all keep hoping to find that “new normal,” and I think we are in it already. At least for now, our new normal will be abnormal.

It’s funny now; it wasn’t then: In early March 2020, I had just gotten back from a team meeting in New York. I was going to be home for a week before embarking on some amazing trips: I was going to finish my sales training in Raleigh; I was going to a telecommunications conference in Chicago; I was going to attend a sales meeting in Texas. Three weeks, three trips…except I didn’t go anywhere!

During that week between trips, the organizers canceled all three. In a matter of four hours or so, The world shut down. I didn’t even leave my state until Summit 2022 in Boston! That was an experience to share in a different blog post. The trip that struck me was a couple of weeks after Summit when the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team met at one of our offices for a week-long strategy session.

At that time, I had been at Red Hat for 2 1/2 years and was a marketing team member for a week shy of a year. I hadn’t met any of my coworkers in person during that time! Let’s be honest, we were there for the strategy sessions, but most of us made the trip for the human connection!

Importance of In-Person

Before the pandemic, I’d had work-from-home days and had been part of remote workforces before I came to Red Hat. I was an all-remote employee before the pandemic. It’s one thing if everyone is remote; it is a mess if you have a hybrid audience. 

Before Red Hat, I worked for GitLab, a company that prides itself on being globally distributed. I felt my team of Solutions Architects had a winning pattern: asynchronous communication, regular 1-on-1s, and weekly team meetings. My favorite part then was that we met in person once a quarter. This balance allowed us to maximize working from home while maintaining regular communication with our team. The in-person meetings allowed us to strategize, whiteboard, or grab a drink with the coworkers we spend hours with weekly.

I missed that balance during the pandemic. I think, though, we are moving back in that direction. 

Hybrid Meetings

Anyway, back to Boston and the in-person strategy session. We spent the first morning meeting everyone and discussing our plans for the future of RHEL. The difficulty was we had well over 25 people in the room and almost as many on a Google Meet!

Here’s where this blog gets informative: It took us the better part of a day to get most of the bugs worked out. We realized that there were some crucial factors to take into consideration:

1) Keep the room quiet. Anytime a bag would open or someone would fidget through their notebook, it would be annoying to those in the room. But to those hearing everything through earbuds, it was downright awful! 

2) Ensure remote attendees can participate. It is effortless to be ignored or for your attention to drift when you are one of the few not on site. We were using Meet for our meeting. It had some beneficial features:

The “raise hand” function allowed people to signal their interest in contributing to the discussion. The raise hand tool even included a queue so people could address their comments in the order they were received. 

We found something new: Google Meet had a “companion mode”. For people in the room, we could join the meeting, use the raise hand tool, and be put into a chat room. Side conversations (or, in our case, humorous tangents) are an unavoidable part of meetings, so, at least in the chat room, these conversations were quiet (see point 1 above) and recorded right along with the meeting video!

Something else we ended up doing was ensuring that someone on the remote call got to present or lead group discussions. The giant floating head effect was a little much, but hey, what can you do. 

Though, we also realized that it’s still easy to do group breakouts with hybrid meetings. When we would assign people to functional breakouts or ice breakers, the virtual room became one of the groups. 

3) Utilize virtual whiteboards or flow charts! Yeah, I know, it’s not as good as everyone circled a physical whiteboard. Still, I was pleasantly surprised by several of the tools we used! There was Miro for virtual whiteboarding and collaboration. We also used Jamboard to do more free-form thinking and capture ideas.  

Wrap up

Hybrid isn’t ideal. Nothing beats being in person for strategy sessions, whiteboarding, and building team spirit! Giving a hug (I’m a huge hugger) or a handshake is the best. However, it’s not always possible with family, health concerns, and logistics.

I am very thankful that we live in a society that accepts and acknowledges that fact. We have the right and the support of others to exercise our decisions. While I still have some anxiety around travel, I enjoy it more, knowing it is my choice.

Nowadays, I’m even safer traveling than I was before. I got bronchitis and a sinus infection on a flight right before a cruise! Now, I have a mask with me at all times. If I feel like some folks around me are less than healthy, I can put it on and rest easier.

These are just some thoughts I had after traveling for the first time in several years. These are just a few lessons our team picked up from our first hybrid meeting. I’d love to hear what has worked for you!

Beginner’s Guide: How To Get Started With Element & Matrix

These days it can be overwhelming to select the best software to use because now more than ever, choices are abundant when it comes to software. Messaging and Communications apps are a great example of that because there are so many options out there. What if you’re looking for a messaging app that is scaleable and privacy-focused? It can be even harder.

Thanks to the Element team, I’ve got a great option to show you. Element, previously known as Riot.im, is a cross-platform client that works on the Matrix protocol. What does that mean? Is Neo the One? Well, let’s talk about the protocol and why you should consider using this great messaging platform.

What Is Matrix?

The Matrix team describes it as an “open standard for secure, de-centralized, real-time communication”. First, it’s open-source, more eyes equals better code. We all know how much I love open source…but for the uninitiated, that means more people can read and study the code, security vulnerabilities can be found and fixed faster, and other projects and contributors can build effective integrations into the source project.

Second, it’s decentralized. This is a little more complicated, but think of it this way, when you stand up an instance of a decentralized application, that is your space. This could be for a family, a meetup, or a company. Everything would be self-contained until you make your instance discoverable. At that point, you@yourhomeserver.com can reach out into the world and find say friend@anotherserver.com.

Thirdly, Matrix supports real-time communications. This includes collaboration, messaging, voice, and even video! Matrix provides a series of encryption algorithms and bridges to facilitate end-user applications to communicate with one another. You may use Etherpad for real-time collaborative document editing, Jitsi for video conferencing, and in today’s blog post, Element for messaging.

Some of the most popular bridges for Matrix are IRC and Gitter. The Open Source Community jumps in with some of their own too, including Telegram and Google Hangouts.

Matrix enables the communications between these platforms within an instance or throughout the interconnected network of Matrix instances across the Internet.

What is Element?

If Matrix is the network, then the Element client is the vehicle that allows you to traverse that network; Element is the interface for text, voice, and video conversations. Just like the Matrix protocol, the Element client is completely open-source!

With the ability to bridge between different apps like Slack right into the Element interface, you no longer need to install and maintain a dozen different apps just to keep in touch with friends, family, work, your volunteer group, your work’s other chat client…you get the idea.

Create an account, activate the needed integrations, and chat with anyone, anywhere on any number of different platforms. Enjoy a 1:1 conversation or hundreds of participants in public rooms.

Bonus: One of my favorite features? Notifications management. I can have every notification from every room, set it to only being notified if I am tagged, or never get any notifications…ever. But Element didn’t stop there, nope, they have one of my favorite notification settings I have ever seen: keyword notifications.

Let’s say I want to know any time someone is talking about dogs. I can add keywords to my configuration and get notified anytime someone says dog, dogs, cats drool, you get the idea!

Element has the option to join the central server at Matrix.org, host your own instance on your own server, or pay a monthly fee for a secure, hosted option. In fact, from their website, you can get up to 5 active users a month for as little as $2/month (USD).

Creating Your Account

It’s now time for you to enter the Matrix and get into your Element. See what I did there? Alright, to get started you will need to create an account. One of the best things about Element is that you can use it on all sorts of devices like your laptop, tablet, phone, or whatever.

For this guide, I’m going to show you how to do it on the Web client in your browser. So open up your favorite browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, and navigate to https://app.element.io.

Your browser will likely ask you to allow access to persistent storage. Accept it that way Element can store your keys, messages, etc. Next, we are going to create an account.

We could create our account on Matrix.Org, but here is a little pro tip: The central server in a federation usually is over-taxed and prone to lag. So, if you know of another public-facing instance, that would be a good bet.

Lucky for us, the community has some awesome members that manage LinuxDelta.com, a community-driven hub for information on Linux distributions, tutorials, and a Matrix server! Instead of using the Matrix.Org option, we are going to go to Advanced/Other:

In the ‘Homeserver URL’ field, type in: https://matrix.linuxdelta.com and click on the green next button. Next, it’s time to create a username. The username will be your display name as well so keep this in mind as you decide. This is what people will see you responding as and how they can tag or search for you! Then create a password, make sure it’s complex. No sense in skimping on security especially if you are utilizing a password manager, like Bitwarden for instance.

Me personally, I am a content creator and a community advocate. I want to be found in the open-source community, so, I would add an email so people can look me up via email. If you do, you’ll of course be sent the customary email confirmation link. For now, though, let’s go ahead and sign in.

Once you have filled in your username, password, and email go ahead and click the green Register button!

This next step is tricky but stay with me. One of the advantages of Element we discussed was end-to-end encryption. We need to generate a Security Key (that is different from our password!). I typically recommend using a system-generated key. Then you can use a secure note somewhere to store the key.

Disclaimer – I changed the security key after writing this blog post, so, don’t think you can get into my account that easily. 😀

Once you’ve saved your key somewhere safe, go ahead and enable notifications and read through some of Element’s recent announcements.

Getting Connected

You are sitting with a brand new, secured account. Now what? Well, Element is a communication platform, let’s find some people to communicate with!

In the middle of the window, there is the option to “Explore Public Rooms”. Let’s click there. Element will default to your home instance, in this case, LinuxDelta.com.

Get connected to The Geek Lab, for instance, by clicking join. That will put you in touch with hundreds of other technology enthusiasts like yourself who hang out, chat, and help each other fix technical problems.

Want to get connected to the broader world? Go back to the Explore button, next to the search bar. In the window we saw before, we have the option to create a new room or select a different server. Let’s hop over to Matrix.org.

There are literally thousands of public rooms covering a crazy number of different topics. Many open-source projects have communities on Matrix. There are HAM radio enthusiasts, D&D (Dungeon and Dragon) hangouts, and even region-focused rooms.

The join process is exactly the same though for a different server, just find a room you want, click join, and start chatting.

There is plenty more to do and discover. From 1 on 1 conversation, adding bridges, and initiating video calls. However, for now, that is all the deeper we will go!

Closing Thoughts

You may be surprised to hear that this is not paid content. I wrote this because I believe in Element. I believe that Matrix is going to have a HUGE part to play in the years to come. There are SO many (read too many) apps to keep track of. Many of them have ads or tracking built-in, or are limited to voice or text. Element, powered by Matrix, has it all. The integrations keep getting better. More and more bridges keep getting built (no pun intended, okay, maybe a little pun).

Open Source is the key. E2E (End to End Encryption) will ensure that your private conversations stay private… You know, I haven’t even mentioned the beautiful interface or that the Element Team releases new features on a frequent basis.

So go sign up and give Element & the Matrix protocol a try! When you get your account registered, be sure to look me up: itguyeric@one.ems.host

(This article was originally posted here and is used and updated with permission.)

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