All feedback will be greatly appreciated. Since this was the first IVM (International Virtual Meeting), future organizers can learn from our mistakes and improve everything that can be bettered.
For the sake of future EBT-IVMs (EuroBillTracker International Virtual Meetings), here are some lessons that may be taken from the first one:
- There are many interesting subjects that weren't even approached here, so I believe there's place to an IVM per year.
- The general categories of subjects approached are fertile and can be revisited:
a. external tools to register notes
b. external tools to create stats and maps
c. games using stats and maps
d. A2E and Working Groups: what they are and do, who are the volunteers and contributors (this wasn't talked about on this edition but should be in future editions)
e. social media, merchandising and exposure
f. notaphily and serial number analysis
g. story time
h. video show of banknote production or other related subjects (a good filler or ending). - Having the meeting in two days, at different times of the day, was probably a good decision.
- A total of 6 hours for the two days was well thought, or maybe a little too long, taking into account the amount of talks. With more personal stories programmed, it could have been perfect.
- The choice of Google Meet as teleconference platform was good (good sound and decent image, easy joining on the Web with no need o install any software, system-agnostic, real-time closed captioning based on speech recognition, easy screen-sharing to present anything a speaker wants, no obligation for the attendees to open their own image or sound, up to 100 participants, no time limit a the time).
- For those who want to attend but can't, be it due to a schedule inconvenience or to not wanting to create a Google account, IVMs should be streamed on YouTube, and this video should be let available afterwards (private, or at least unlisted), with a link provided for EBT forumers (this wasn't done; in the future, this means announcing it, as attendees must agree on it beforehand, a least implicitly)-
- Speakers should be a mix of invited speakers (the only kind we had on the first edition) and talk applicants. This means launching a call for speakers beforehand (2 months as a minimum), and may be particularly important to gather speakers for the story time, with their own stories related to EBT.
- Coordinating the program time slots should be done in sufficient advance: the keynote speakers must be established and scheduled at least 1 month in advance.
- The self-presentation script I had created was not used at all. I realized that a simple non-scripted self-presentation of attendees is enough.
A couple of loose comments more:
- Free Google Meet has, since September 2020, a 60-minute time limit.
- After the first edition, I was informed that there's yet another app to register notes, the f-droid app "EBT New Note". I couldn't find much about it, and I don't know who its author marv42 is on EBT.