Welcome to the Klimacamp 3.1! We are happy that you are giving a workshop with us. Here you will find a first overview of the technical tools used in the workshops on the camp and some important tips to make sure that all goes well from a technical perspective. This site is still under construction and not yet complete.
If you have any questions or need support, you can reach us at tech@klimacamp-leipzigerland.de, call our tech-support 004934296919740 (german landline) during the camp weekend or just write in our #techsupport chat.
We use open source software and data privacy is important to us.
Workshops at the climate camp 3.1
In the workshop tents on the camp there are
- a BigBlueButton video conference room
- a text chat to raise one’s hand, vote, share files
- an interactive whiteboard for sorting, collecting, getting creative
- a pad for logging
You can soon see here what that will look like.
To make sure the workshop runs smoothly from a technical perspective, we have put together a few tips for you:
Good Internet / Wifi
A good Internet connection makes video conferencing a lot easier. Often the bad connection is due to the bad wifi signal in your house rather than the Internet line itself. Therefore, it is best to connect directly to your router via a LAN cable. If this does not work, do not sit too far away from your wifi router. If you are on the Internet with a mobile data connection, find a place with a stable mobile data connection and make sure you have enough data volume.
For ideal conditions you need about 3 Mbps upload and 7 Mbps download speed to our servers in Germany. You can check if this works in advance with e.g. https://bandspeed.de/.
Computing Power
Video telephony demands a lot from your computer. It’s best to close all other programs except the browser and – depending on how fast your computer is – don’t have too many tabs open at once.
Headset
The microphone in your computer is usually of very poor quality. To improve the voice quality, it is therefore worth using a headset. It also avoids echo, the effect of everyone hearing each other twice if you are not muted.
Mute
In large groups, it is recommended to mute your own microphone when you are not speaking yourself. In smaller groups and if the sound quality allows it, it may be more comfortable not to turn off the microphone. In this case, the person speaking has less of a feeling of talking against a wall.
You can mute yourself by clicking on the small microphone icon at the bottom of the screen or by pressing the M button.
As a workshop facilitator
For you as a workshop facilitator and moderator, BigBlueButton has a few more functions than for the participants:
Mute other participants
You can mute participants by clicking on the name of the person in the participants list and then selecting Mute. This can be useful if they don’t mute themselves, which can cause annoying background noise.
To mute all users (and not yourself) you can go to the settings (picture) and select ‘Mute all users except presenter’.
Create breakout rooms
With BigBlueButton you can easily create Breakout Rooms, i.e. smaller sub-rooms, for example for a small group phase. To do this, click on Settings and then ‘Create Breakout Rooms’. Here you can choose how many rooms you want, distribute the participants among the rooms or let them choose one themselves.
Moderation
Even more than offline, it can be useful online to moderate group discussions. A good way to do this is via text chat. It has proven to be a good idea for participants to sign up in the chat with an asterisk (*). This way you can also see in which order they have registered and keep a speech list.
You can also use our text chat to create polls. Just type /poll in the chat and press Enter. Then you can enter question and answer options. You can use a poll to capture the mood of the group.
Thanks to technischerpunkt.org and ras2020.raumstation.org.
