SpeakApp
brainstorming meetings online

Who are we?

The Belle II collaboration consists of over one thousand physicists (including students) and engineers from 27 countries with the common goal of building a new apparatus called Belle II and then analyzing its data. The Belle II experiment will be the first super B-Factory experiment and is designed to find New Physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

We just want to discuss things

In Belle II, our many international research groups and subgroups meet on a weekly or biweekly basis and carry out about 3355 hours of meetings a month, with many concurrent meetings from a few up to 300 remote participants each.

We needed an easy to use and robust teleconferencing system, working on commonly available devices such as Macs, PCs, tablets, and smartphones. For us, the quality of audio and slides is very important, since these are the carriers of the thoughts and ideas.

Why SpeakApp?

SpeakApp is the only solution — as far as I know — specifically designed for scientific research groups, therefore a perfect fit for us. It has a simple and intuitive user interface, which lets us focus on the presented ideas with no distractions.

To store slides and presentations we use CERN's Indico and Atlassian's Confluence systems. SpeakApp makes these materials seamlessly available at meetings. We can also download currently shown slides straight from the screen. These features are very convenient.

Agility

During one of our collaboration General Meetings, there was a failure in the other teleconferencing system we use. There was a quick change over to SpeakApp allowed remote members to take part in the tutorials, which needed a screen sharing feature, not available in SpeakApp at that time. The agile SpeakApp team added basic support for screen sharing overnight to help us overcome the problem.

Bugs are fixed and new convenient features are sometimes added before we even formally request them. It is clear that the developers understand what the community needs due to their own scientific background as well as by paying attention to how Belle II collaborators interact with SpeakApp.

Endorsement

With the robust and simple SpeakApp system we can communicate efficiently and just focus on our work.