Like everyone in the world working from home during the pandemic, we saw a sudden switch to intensive use of video conferencing for the past eight weeks.
Daily stand-ups with clients, coffee chats with colleagues, meetings, on and on, up to the point you feel you’re only in video calls the entire day. It was such a sudden increase that it now feels suddenly odd to have an actual phone call, without video.
I want to jot down some of our experiences with various video conferencing tools these past weeks, and how it compares to ‘before’. It’s a good thing meanwhile to keep in mind that phones, sms, mail etc also still exist.
One of the first things that stood out for my company at the start of the lock down was that while we did have regular video conferences previously, we didn’t host them ourselves. It was mostly at the invitation of clients or others, using their solutions such as Webex, and Skype for business. Amongst ourselves we used Skype, but usually made regular phone calls. Within my World Bank projects we used Skype as well.
Our cloud tool, NextCloud offers NextCloud Talk, supported with a STUN and a TURN server. We tested this and it works reasonably well for up to 4 people. Our first experiences were however not convincing enough to want to use it for larger groups or as a default for client interaction. We did however use it with one client reliably with 3 to 4 people.
Next to our existing NextCloud we added Zoom, with 4 hosts. Zoom works very well, also with a few dozen participants, and we have been using it for our own all-hands meetings, weekly check-ins and daily coffee times. We also used Zoom for an online workshop, including the use of break-out rooms and that worked very well. Zoom however has been the subject of a lot of privacy and data security criticism, which have only in part been addressed. Various clients of ours do not allow Zoom. Specifically the use of the Zoom client is seen as problematic, some do allow their people participating in a Zoom call through their browser.
Meanwhile our clients operating within the Microsoft silo speeded up their switch to Microsoft Teams, which meant that our interaction with them takes place through Teams’ video conferencing. This for us reduced the need for being the host of a range of meetings, and our need for Zoom.
Still we wanted another video conferencing option for ourselves, that supports larger groups, and is within our own scope of control. We arranged for a managed Jitsi server for our company’s use. This at first glance looked like it might be an expensive solution (as it meant a bespoke service as no regular hosting offers were to be found), but in the end our existing cloud hoster provided us with our own Jitsi server geared to use for larger groups against low costs. Our experiences with Jitsi are somewhat mixed. It works best if everyone is on Chrome browsers, but that in itself is not really desirable nor even easy to ask of every participant. Jitsi does not allow for scheduling or planning a call, as you can only login as a host after starting a call. Jitsi also does not support break out rooms, nor is it on the current development agenda it seems. We’ve used Jitsi reliably in various settings, both with others and amongst ourselves, including a group of 8 people from different organisations. In that case being able to offer to use Jitsi on our own server made the call possible in the first place, as several participants were adamant about not wanting to use other tools such as Zoom.
So the current reality is that we use Nextcloud Talk, Jitsi, Teams, Zoom all in parallel, depending on context and participants, while we also still participate in Hangouts, Webex and Skype for Business meetings. The only thing that has seen a reduction of use is regular phone calls, which upon reflection is an odd effect, as no-one set out to replace or try to improve upon those. Maybe it’s because all the video conferencing tools bring the conversations into the device you have in front of you working from home all day anyway: your computer screen.
> “now feels suddenly odd to have an actual phone call, without video”
This is how I’ve felt for years, but people kept insisting on using the phone (so much so that my answering machine message basically said “don’t phone me, send me an email”).
Yes, that is the same for me. Probably for a decade now my voicemail message is ‘dm or mail me with your question’. I’m not someone that enjoys phone calls, find them mostly intrusive and disrupting. However now I did find myself surprised on occasion that someone would phone me and not videocall, and my colleagues expressed feeling a similar suprise.
Today we joined the HSTM20 Unconference, organised by our friend Oliver with logistics support from Peter, who live on Prince Edward Island in Canada. HSTM stands for Home Stuff That Matters, that last bit is a nod to our STM birthday unconferences, so this is as Peter said today, another branch on the evolving tree of unconference events.
The Home, in Home Stuff That Matters points to us all being home due to the pandemic, and to the two questions we discussed. What have you learned from the pandemic that you want to keep for the future? What do you like about the place where you live?
We were over 25 people, from around the world, across ten time zones, so from morning coffee time to end of afternoon, and evening. It was a nice mix of familiar faces and new ones, spending two hours in conversation. It was good to see dear friends, as well as meeting people again we first met last year when we visited Peter, Catherine and Oliver on PEI for a face to face unconference.
The event also showed how well Zoom works. With over 25 participants from literally around the world, with a wide variety of bandwith and tech savviness it worked without issue, splitting up from a plenary into multiple groups and rejoining into a plenary. It’s in a different class than other tools I’ve been using, even with its dubious information ethics.
Regrouping ourselves as Oliver’s tribe this time, it was an excellent way to kick-off our weekend.
Part of Oliver’s tribe in conversation today
Wednesday it was 18 years ago that I first posted in this space. The pace of writing has varied over the years, obviously intensively at the start, and in the past 3 years I have been blogging much more frequently again (with a correlated drop off in my Facebook activity to 0), more than at the start even.
This year is of course different, with most of the people I know globally living much more hyper local lives due to pandemic lockdowns. This past year of blogging turned out more introspective as a consequence. In the past few years I took the anniversary of this blog to reflect on how to raise awareness for grasping your own agency and autonomy online, and reading last year‘s it’s so full of activity from our current perspective, organising events, going places. None of that was possible really this year. I returned home from the French Alps late February and since then haven’t seen much more than my work space at home, and the changing of the seasons in the park around the corner, punctuated only with a half dozen brief visits to Amsterdam and two or three to Utrecht in the past 8 months. A habit of travel has morphed into having the world expedited to our doorstep, in cardboard packaging in the back of delivery vans.
Likewise my ongoing efforts and thinking concerning networked agency, distributed digital transformation and ethics as a practice has had a more inward looking character.
Early in the year we completed the shift of my company’s internal systems to self-hosted Nextcloud and Rocket.chat. When the pandemic started we added our own Jitsi server for video conferencing, although in practice with larger groups we use Zoom mostly, next to the systems our clients rolled out (MS Teams mostly). Similarly I will soon have completed the move of the Dutch Creative Commons chapter, where I’m a board member, to Nextcloud as well. That way the tools we use align better with our stated mission and values.
I spent considerable time renovating my PKM system, and the tools supporting it, with Obsidian the biggest change in tooling underneath that system since a decade or so. It means I am now finally getting away from using Evernote. Although I haven’t figured out yet what to do, if anything, with what I stored in Evernote in the 10 years I’ve been using it daily.
This spring I left Facebook and Whatsapp completely (I’ve never used Instagram), not wanting to have anything to do anymore with the Facebook company. I departed from my original FB account 3 years ago, which led to me blogging much more again, but created a new account after a while to maintain a link to some. That new account slowly but steadily crept back into the ‘dull’ moments of the day, and when the pandemic increased the noise and hysterics levels aided by FB’s algorithmic amplification outrage machine, I decided enough was enough. A 2.5 year process! It more or less shows how high the, mostly misplaced, sense of cost of leaving can be. And it was also surprising how some take such a step as an act of personal rejection.
I also see my Twitter usage reducing, in favour of interacting more on my personal Mastodon instance, through e-mail (yay for e-mail) and LinkedIn (where your interaction is tied to your professional reputation so much less of a ragefest). Even though I never dip into the actual Twitter stream, as I only check Twitter using Tweetdeck to keep track of specific topics, groups and interests. This summer I from close-up saw how the trolls came for a colleague that moved to a position in national media. Even if the trolling and vitriol was perhaps mild by e.g. US standards, it made me realise again how there was an ocean of toxic interaction just a single click away from where I usually am on Twitter.
On the IndieWeb side of things, I of course did not get to organise new IndieWebCamps like last year in Amsterdam and Utrecht. I’ve thought about doing some online events, but my energy flowed elsewhere. I’ve looked more inwardly here as well. I’ve been bringing my presentation slides ‘home’, closing my Slideshare account, and removing my company from Scribd as well. This is a still ongoing process. The solution is now clear and functional, but moving over the few hundred documents is something that will take a bit of time. I don’t want to move over the bulk of 14 years of shared slide decks, but want to curate the collection down to those that are relevant still, and those that were published in my blog posts at the time.
I am tinkering with a version of this site that isn’t ‘stream’ (blogposts in reverse chronological order), and isn’t predominantly ‘garden’ (wiki-style pseudo-static content), but a mix of it. I’ve been treating different types of content here differently for some time already. A lot never is shown on the front page. Some posts are never distributed through RSS, while some others are only distributed through RSS and unlisted on the site (my week notes for instance). Now I am working on removing what is so clearly a weblog interface from the front page. The content will still be there of course, the RSS feeds will keep feeding, all the URLs will keep working, but the front of this site I think should morph into something that is much more a mix of daily changes and highlighted fixtures. Reflecting my current spectrum of interests more broadly, and providing a sense of exploration, as well as the daily observations and occurrences.
Making such a change to the site is also to introduce a bit of friction, of a need to spend time to be able to get to know the perspectives I share here if you newly arrive here. I think that there should be increased friction with increased social distance. You’ll know me better if you spend time here. The Twitter trolling example above is a case of unwanted assymmetry in my eyes: it’s incredibly easy for total strangers to lob emotion-grenades at someone, low cost for them, potentially high-impact for the receiver. Getting within ‘striking distance’ of someone should carry a cost and risk for the other party as well. A mutuality, to phrase it more constructively.
Here’s to another year of blogging and such mutuality. My feed reader brings me daily input from so many of you, around the world, and I’m looking forward to many more distributed conversations based on that. Thank you for reading!