AIB's First Hybrid Assembly With Associates

 By Mary Fons, AIB

Last month (that would be March 2025 to future readers!) we AIB members held our first General Assembly of the year. For the first time, our associates were able to join us – mostly in person, too! Unfortunately, much as we love to see one another face to face, there's always someone who can't make it.

Early (Amateurish) Attempts: Great Intentions

We operate as a group so ideally we want everyone's input when we get together to assess the past and work out our plans for the future, but we are rarely if ever all in the same city at the same time, so we first dipped our toes into remote participation a year or two before the pandemic. It was an exercise in frustration. We didn't know much about remote audio, connection quality, or microphone types. We could tell we needed different equipment – but had no idea what to buy or how much it might cost. 

We were also undisciplined about not interrupting when things got interesting. Or funny! Remote participants were more or less able to follow an uninterrupted presentation, but it was hard for those of us attending in person to hear them properly when they spoke, and our on-site exchanges were thoroughly confusing to them, with terrible sound at the other end, so we dropped the idea.

Remote Simultaneous Interpretation: Our Chance to Learn

Fast forward through a pandemic, one of the strictest lockdown policies in Europe and five years of remote simultaneous interpretation (we interpreters call it "RSI" for short –  nothing to do with painful wrists). 

Having been forced by circumstances to train in order to provide RSI services, we AIBers learned a lot about remote connections and remote interaction. We all bought equipment individually, experimented with its use as a community, shared tips with the larger interpreter community, and brought it all to bear once we were able to meet in person again. Just a couple of years after lockdown measures terminated our March 2020 General Assembly a couple of hours early, we had worked out how to set up a small-scale hybrid general assembly of our own at a very reasonable cost (viz., the taxi I need to carry all my equipment to the meeting venue). 

I was proud. Sure, there were hiccups, but with 10 or 12 in-person attendees at most and plenty of mutual trust, we were able to overcome the issues, have some laughs, and take it all in stride. We still have our occasional moments with reverberation at the start of our meetings: certain timing constraints mean that we're simultaneously trying to set everything up at the venue and communicate what's going on to our remote attendees. While our audio setup is not suitable for interpretation purposes, we've certainly managed to avoid any eardrum-shattering feedback and we know what action to take when problems arise. 

Scaling Up

But now our AIB family is larger. We have seven associates, and we definitely want to hear from them as we figure out our second quarter-century, so our latest General Assembly was a much bigger in-person affair and we needed more space. I figured we'd need more than one cardioid microphone to pass around and more than one webcam, so I planned for that and brought two tripods for the webcam, two USB-C adapters, and my usual full complement of cables, modem and so forth. Still, I was on tenterhooks –  proud to show off the system to my fellow geeks among our newbies, yet uneasy about the increased number of on-site connections. Despite my everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to packing, would the enlarged meeting fail because of missing equipment? 

I needn't have worried. AIB has always been a supportive community, never more so than over the need to figure out RSI, and that attitude is shared by the colleagues we invited in. Associates Anna and Josh were able to deliver an excellent presentation and share it online, and Daniel immediately stepped up to take charge of the second webcam and mic for our discussions.

Were there hiccups? Sure. But we had a few laughs, we tweaked the system, and I know we'll do better next time (Daniel already had a couple of good suggestions). It was wonderful to welcome Alex, Anna, Daniel, Ignasi, Josh and Laia to a proper meeting in person, and to see and hear Eleonora remotely. And I'm no longer the lone resident in-person geek!

Don't Do This At Home At Work

Guess what? A decent large-scale hybrid meeting still requires good equipment and professional sound engineers who understand telecoms (even better: a large-enough team, with someone specifically in charge of telecoms who understands how they interface with sound). The more people and the more microphones are located in a single space together, the more likely is a speaker's sound to start reverberating through the sound system. If people have to share mics and pass them around during an important exchange of views, things will inevitably slow down and the flow will be more awkward.

Now add simultaneous interpreting to the mix. Without experienced technicians, your on-site audience may find itself hearing the interpreters over the meeting sound system (so the interpreters hear themselves louder than they hear the speakers) and reverberation or feedback noises may ensue. Professional tech support becomes even more important when simultaneous interpretation is offered at a hybrid meeting.

But hey, on a smaller scale and without interpretation, DIY is definitely doable.

Practical Tips

Here are my tips for a successful DIY hybrid meeting on the cheap:

• If the on-site numbers are small enough, a single wired USB microphone with a long cord is better than two mics connected to separate laptops. It's the simplest way to ensure that only one mic is on at a time in the same room.
• If you have more than one mic, each connected to a different computer, then make sure each has a mute button and a light that shows when it's muted. Fiddling about with on-screen mute buttons is annoying –  and sometimes unreliable.
• Use microphones with a cardioid pickup pattern for clarity. You don't want a mic that picks up all the sound (and all the noise!) from all over the room.
• Use a webcam on a tripod so you can easily turn it around and aim it at whoever is speaking in the room. Don't use the webcam mic.
• Do whatever it takes to ensure a reliable connection. We usually bring our own 4G modem and connect to it using an Ethernet cable. Wi-Fi often wavers!
• Buy, beg or borrow a loudspeaker that's loud and clear enough for everyone in the room to hear. Make sure it can connect properly to the same laptop the videoconference mic is connected to. It won't hurt if someone can bring a backup.
• Put someone in charge of monitoring and managing the videoconference. Not the chairperson or the minute-taker, though.
• Ideally, use the same computer for projection and for the videoconference, so everyone can see the remote participants properly. 
• For a meeting room with no projector, you can connect a second laptop or tablet to the videoconferencing platform as long as they stay 100% muted (both mic and speakers), e.g. for people on the other side of a single table. Caveat: tablet output is notoriously hard to mute when you want it muted.
  

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