I’d like to be clear that I don’t hate in-person meetings, despite what some have been posting recently on a Facebook group for meeting professionals:
“Often wondered why so many on this feed hate live events.”
“It is my opinion that this group does not support any in-person meetings or gatherings of any kind…”
” I am sad to see so many industry giants verbally destroying our industry – apparently with glee.”
Let’s explore what’s causing opinions and feelings like this in the meeting industry.
As I’ve said before, the pandemic’s impact on lives and businesses has been devastating, especially for the meeting industry. COVID-19 has virtually eliminated in-person meetings: our industry’s bread and butter. Many meeting professionals have lost their jobs, and are understandably desperate for our industry to recover. We are all looking for ways for in-person meetings to return.
Unfortunately, I and many others believe there is a strong case to make against currently holding in-person meetings. Ethically, despite the massive personal and financial consequences, we should not be submitting people to often-unadvertised, dangerous, and life-threatening conditions so we can go back to work.
I’ve been posting bits and pieces of the case against currently holding in-person meetings on various online platforms and decided it was time to bring everything together in one (long for me) post. I hope many meeting industry professionals will read this and respond. As always, all points of view are welcome, especially those that can share how to mitigate any of the following concerns.
Here are four important reasons why I think we shouldn’t be holding “large” in-person meetings right now. (Obviously, “large” is a moving target. Checking Georgia Tech’s COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool as I write this, a national US event with 500 people is extremely likely (>95%) to have one or more COVID-19-positive individuals present.)
Seven months ago, I explained why, in my opinion, in-person meetings do not make sense in a COVID-19 environment. I assumed that in-person meetings could, in principle, be held safely if everyone:
Even if one could meet these difficult conditions, I questioned the value of such in-person meetings. Why? Because meetings are fundamentally about connection around relevant content. And it’s impossible to connect well with people wearing face masks who are six or more feet apart!
In addition, there’s ample evidence that some people won’t follow declared safety protocols. Since I wrote that post, we have heard reports and seen examples of in-person meetings where attendees and staff are not reliably social distancing, and/or aren’t wearing masks properly or at all.
This is most likely to happen during socials and meals, where attendees have to temporarily remove masks. It’s understandably hard for people to resist our lifetime habit of moving close to socialize.
Many venues trumpet their comprehensive COVID-19 cleaning protocols. Extensive cleaning was prudent during the early pandemic months when we didn’t know much about how the virus spread. But we now know that extensive cleaning is hygiene theater (1, 2); the primary transmission vector for COVID-19 is airborne.
A recent editorial in the leading scientific journal Nature begins: “Catching the virus from surfaces is rare” and goes on to say “efforts to prevent spread should focus on improving ventilation or installing rigorously tested air purifiers”.
I haven’t heard of any venues that have publicly explained how their ventilation systems minimize or eliminate the chance of airborne COVID-19 transmission!
Why? Because it’s a complicated, and potentially incredibly expensive issue to safely mitigate. And venues are reluctant or unable to do the custom engineering and, perhaps, costly upgrades necessary to ensure that the air everyone breaths onsite is HEPA-filtered fast enough to keep any COVID-positive attendee shedding at a safe level.
Adequate ventilation of indoor spaces where people have removed masks for eating or drinking is barely mentioned in governmental gathering requirements (like this one, dated March 3, 2021, from the State of Nevada). These guidelines assume that whatever ventilation existed pre-COVID is adequate under the circumstances, as long as all parties are socially distanced. We know from research that there are locales — e.g. dining rooms with low ceilings or inadequate ventilation — where this is not a safe practice, since it’s possible for COVID-carrying aerosols to travel far further than 6 feet.
In case you are interested, current recommendations are for MERV 13 filtering throughout the venue. Does your venue offer this?
P.S. I expect there are venues that have done this work. Do you know of venues that have done the engineering to certify a measurable level of safe air on their premises? If so, please share in the comments! We should know about these conscientious organizations.
Shockingly, many in-person meetings now taking place require no pretesting of staff or attendees. (News flash: Checking someone’s forehead temperature when they enter a venue will not detect anyone who is infectious for the two days before symptoms appear, or who is asymptomatic.)
Even if everyone in the venue is tested daily, the widely used quick tests are simply too unreliable. From Nature again:
“Deeks says that a December trial at the University of Birmingham is an example of how rapid tests can miss infections. More than 7,000 symptom-free students there took an Innova test; only 2 tested positive. But when the university researchers rechecked 10% of the negative samples using PCR, they found another 6 infected students. Scaling that up across all the samples, the test probably missed 60 infected students.”
—Nature, February 9, 2021, Rapid coronavirus tests: a guide for the perplexed
Finally, I find it upsetting that venues like the OCCC keep claiming that they are #MeetingSafely when they are doing no post-event follow-up! If an attendee contracts COVID-19 at the event, returns home and infects grandma, how would the OCCC ever know?! Under the circumstances, I think it’s misleading, dangerous, and unethical for such a venue to publicly claim that they are providing an #MeetingSafely environment.
In fact, some in-person meetings quietly acknowledge that they may not be providing a “safe” environment. One meeting venue held an in-person meeting that required waivers that forever bind attendees and their family members, and “heirs, assigns and personal representatives” not to sue if they contract COVID-19.
“I voluntarily assume full responsibility for any risks of loss or personal injury, including serious illness, injury or death, that may be sustained by me or by others who come into contact with me, as a result of my presence in the Facilities, whether caused by the negligence of the AKC or OCCC or otherwise … I UNDERSTAND THIS IS A RELEASE OF LIABILITY AND AGREE THAT IT IS VALID FOREVER. It is my express intent that this Waiver binds; (i) the members of my family and spouse, if I am alive, and (ii) my heirs, assigns and personal representatives, if I am deceased.”
—Extract from the Orlando, Florida, OCCC American Kennel Club National Championship Dog Show, December 2020, Waiver
I’m not sure how you can bind people to a contract who may not know they are a party to it. But, hey, I’m not a lawyer…
For the reasons shared above, I don’t believe we can safely and ethically hold in-person meetings right now. Consequently, it’s alarming that many venues, and some meeting planners, are promoting in-person meetings in the near future.
By now it should be clear that I stand with meeting professionals like Cathi Lundgren, who posted the following in our Facebook group discussions:
“I’m not going to be silent when someone holds a meeting in a ballroom with a 100+ people and no masking or social distancing…I own a global meetings company—and we haven’t worked since March but no matter how much I want to get back at it I’m not going to condone behaviors that are not positive for the overall health of our industry.”
—Cathi Lundgren, CMP, CAE
And here’s how I replied to the first Facebook commenter quoted at the top of this post:
“For goodness sake. I LOVE in-person events. It’s been heartbreaking for me, like everyone, to have not attended one for a year now. But that doesn’t mean I am going to risk stakeholder, staff, and attendee lives by uncritically supporting in-person meetings that are, sadly, according to current science, still dangerous to attend. When in-person meetings are safe to attend once more — and that day can’t come soon enough — you bet I’ll be designing, facilitating, and attending them.”
I hope it’s clear that I, and those meeting professionals who are pointing out valid safety and ethical concerns, don’t hate in-person meetings. Realistically, the future of in-person meetings remains uncertain, even with the amazing progress in developing and administering effective vaccines. More mutant COVID-19 strains that are resistant to or evade current vaccines, transmit more effectively, or have more deadly effects are possible. Any such developments could delay or fundamentally change our current hopes that maintaining transmission prevention plus mass vaccination will bring the pandemic under control.
I’m cautiously optimistic. But, right now, there are still too many unknowns for me to recommend clients to commit resources to future large 100% in-person events. Hub-and-spoke format hybrid meetings look like a safer bet. Regardless, everyone in the meeting industry hopes that it will be safe to hold in-person meetings real soon.
In the meantime, please don’t attack those of us in the industry who point out safety and ethical issues and the consequences of prematurely scheduling in-person meetings. We want them back too! We all miss them.
My post on gamification last week garnered plenty of comments on LinkedIn. Many responses exposed the vague ways people use the word gamification to imply, well, something good about a service that some companies provide. Like advertising’s liberal use of improved! without explaining what’s improved, the genius of the word gamification is that it can be applied as a plausible-sounding selling point to all kinds of products, without ever saying what gamification is, or specifying its benefits. So let’s explore the gulf between playing games and gamification in the world of events.
Bernie DeKoven published his classic book The Well-Played Game, (originally published in 1978) long before its time. Eventually, a generation of game designers discovered its importance and the book was reissued in 2013, five years before his death.
I was lucky enough to play games led by Bernie. I still remember my joy while playing a glorious session of the “pointless game” Prui. (Recommendation: play Prui at least once before you die. A group of people and an empty room is all you need.)
Here’s an eloquent description of game designer and performative games artist Professor Eric Zimmerman‘s experience of playing games with Bernie in the ’60s:
“Not too long ago, I was privileged to take part in a New Games event led by Bernie. On a brisk afternoon in the Netherlands, a few dozen players stood outside in a circle. With the boundless panache of a practiced ringmaster and the eternal patience of a kindergarten teacher, Bernie taught us several games.
Bernie led by example, always reminding us that we could change the rules to suit the moment, or that we could exit the game whenever we wanted. Attuned to the spirit of the group, he flowed effortlessly from one game to another, tweaking a ruleset to make a game feel better, always somehow knowing exactly when it was time to move on.
He wove his spell. Or, rather, we wove it together. As we threw animal gestures across thin air, raced like hell with locked knees to capture enemies, and became a single blind organism with a forest of groping hands, Bernie helped us massage our play into a more beautiful shape. In a short space of time, jaded gamers, know-it-all developers, and standoffish academics became squealing, sweating, smiling purveyors of play.
‘This is amazing! I can feel the equilibrium shift and restore itself. I can’t tell which one of us is making it happen. But I feel so sensitive–I can sense the game. I can sense the way we’re playing it together. And I love it. I love being this way. I love doing this thing, playing this game with you.'”
—Eric Zimmerman, from the original Foreword to The Well-Played Game
I hope it’s obvious at this point what a well-played game can be like. (Though, of course, experiencing transcends reading about a game.)
One more quote. Bernie wrote the following in 1978 about playing well:
“If I’m playing well, I am, in fact, complete. I am without purpose because all my purposes are being fulfilled. I’m doing it. I am making it. I’m succeeding. This is the reason for playing this game. This is the purpose of this game for me. The goals, the rules, everything I did to create the safety and permission I needed, were so that I could do this-so I could experience this excellence, this shared excellence of the well-played game.”
I’m hearing joy here.
Merriam-Webster defines gamification as “the process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation”.
Now, compare what you’ve just read with your experience of “gamification” of meetings.
If you’re like me, there’s no comparison between the experience of playing a game well and the experience (often negative) of participating in “gamified” conference sessions. The former is transcendent, the latter is often something to avoid.
As I wrote last week, gamification concentrates on competition and rewards to encourage participation. Proponents don’t directly address whether gamification leads to joy and fun. Instead, they imply it by including a version of the word “game”.
As game designer and author Ian Bogost put it:
“The rhetorical power of the word “gamification” is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.”
—Ian Bogost, Gamification is Bullshit (2011)
Yes, competitive experiences can be fun. (Though, as I write this on the morning of Super Bowl Sunday 2020, I’m wondering how much fun the Chiefs and Buccaneer players will experience.) It turns out that including competition in a well-played game is surprisingly tricky. Bernie, who designed events and computer games in the 1970s and ’80s, wrote extensively about this, including the roles of coaches and spectators.
Yes, rewards can be fun too, provided the rewards are, well, rewarding.
The problem is that manufactured competitive experiences usually feel fake. I’m supposed to get excited about beating some other randomly chosen team so I can win a prize I generally don’t want that much. Even if the prize is substantial — “an all-expenses paid trip to Hawaii!” — what I have to go through to “win” is unlikely to feel joyous.
And, of course, “you have to play to win.” But, as Bernie says in The Well-Played Game:
“…as I’ve seen and said so many times, if I have to play, I’m not really playing.”
Once someone requires you to “play the game”, gamification becomes little more than trying to make an obligatory task more enjoyable. Articles like this one, which touts the benefits of gamification on an already highly competitive group, are silent on the effects of a coercive learning environment on participants in general, many of whom may resent being constantly compared with their peers.
Many of the comments on last week’s post referenced using games to improve the effectiveness of learning, or adding some fun activities to an event. This is a straw man argument, because, yes, using games to achieve specific objectives, like learning something experientially or having fun is often helpful. Applied Improvisation (1, 2), about which I’ve written a fair amount, is a fine example, as are serious games. But these approaches are not gamification as it’s routinely marketed! In reality, these are game-like activities that have value in their own right, rather than band-aiding them onto existing meeting activities.
In contrast, the concept of “gamifying” something we already do at a meeting is a marketing strategy rather than something that’s useful.
Here are a couple of examples of successfully incorporating game playing, ala Bernie DeKoven, into events.
Several years ago, I participated in a high-end business simulation during a meeting industry conference. [If anyone can provide more information on this session, please let me know!]
It included briefings and a set of high-quality videos that introduced a motorsports business situation leading to several possible choices. We split into small groups and discussed what our group thought was the best choice. We shared and discussed the group conclusions en masse and chose one of them, which led to another video segment showing the consequences and giving us another set of choices. After, I think, three choice points, the simulation ended and we debriefed and discussed the lessons learned.
The small groups didn’t create significant connection, so I wouldn’t class this as gamification, but it was a learning experience with game-like features.
I remember that creating this single example was clearly very expensive and only provided limited (though probably quite effective) learning. The session provided the same kind of experience as some interactive courseware built for education.
Ask people what “improvisation” brings to mind, and many mention improvisation in the performing arts, aka improv. As the name suggests, applied improvisation (AI) applies improv techniques, skills, and games developed and formalized over the last hundred years to learning activities in areas like team building, social work, health care, responding to emergencies, etc. — in other words, student-centered interactive learning.
Today, AI practitioners have a rich inventory of hundreds of games, with a myriad of variations. (Some invented, as you might expect, in the moment as needed.) A skilled AI practitioner can design meeting sessions that satisfy complex needs for improved human interaction. These sessions are also a lot of fun!
Both of the above examples require significant resources. Simulations involve careful learning design plus the creation of supporting materials. Successful AI must be led by a highly trained, skillful, and experienced practitioner.
In addition, these approaches are not examples of gamification. Why? Because simulations and AI sessions are designed from the ground up to meet specific outcomes, rather than slapping achievements, badges, leader boards, and payments onto a traditional learning environment.
To conclude, incorporating playing games thoughtfully and productively into meetings is possible, and desirable. But it’s not something you can do meaningfully on a formulaic basis by adding competition and rewards, which is what proponents of gamification are selling. Caveat emptor!
Gamification “makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli”. Education professor Amy Bruckman coined this analogy in a 1999 paper on game software design:
“Most attempts at making software both educational and fun end up being neither. Fun is often treated like a sugar coating to be added to an educational core. Which makes about as much sense as chocolate-dipped broccoli. The problem is that too many game designers are using long-outmoded models of what it means to be “educational”.
Game designer and author Ian Bogost makes the same point somewhat more forcefully:
“…gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is video games and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.
Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word “gamification” is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.”
—Ian Bogost, Gamification is Bullshit (2011)
Merriam-Webster defines gamification as “the process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation.” Nick Pelling, a British computer programmer and inventor, apparently coined the word around 2002.
The concept derives from loyalty reward systems, first developed over two hundred years ago, which have morphed through multiple incarnations (anyone remember S&H Green Stamps?) into today’s frequent flier miles and retailer brand loyalty cards.
So gamification adds the potential reward of interaction with others to the material rewards offered by loyalty reward systems.
Having fun, playing, and playing games are incredibly important human activities. My late friend Bernie DeKoven was an eloquent, passionate, and thoughtful writer and practitioner of these basic human pursuits. I miss him. (Here’s the story of how Bernie shattered my life-long perspective of chess.)
Proponents of using gamification in events claim that introducing fun and games into meetings must be a Good Thing. What could be wrong with making your meeting more fun?
So, here’s what Bernie said in a 2013 interview in Wired (emphasis added):
“I’m not convinced that efforts to make work fun are destined for success. I think the same thing about efforts to make learning fun, or writing fun, or just about anything else that we want to make fun fun.
Because, now that you ask, most human endeavors are already fun. Because the thing that keeps the best of us as good as we are is the fun we find in doing what we do, whether the thing we are doing is building a house or a game or a community, making plans or music or medicines, fixing the plumbing or a computer network or a school system, writing poems or proposals. Engineers, mathematicians, surgeons, dancers, architects, so many of the truly accomplished many readily confess to how much fun they are having doing whatever it is that they do. Gamification? They don’t need no stinkin’ gamification. They don’t need to keep score, to get trophies. What they need is the opportunity to do the work they do best.”
—Bernie DeKoven: Designing Deep Fun Into Games & Other Life Necessities
I agree with Bernie. Many companies offer gamification products and services to slot into an event. (Googling “event gamification” returns about five million hits.) Supposedly, the achievements, badges, leader boards, and payments (real or virtual) of gamification improve the meeting experience, or its effectiveness in some way. But the case studies companies provide (such as these or these) offer no hard evidence that event gamification provides any tangible benefit compared to using meeting designs that meet participants’ wants and needs.
Justifying paying (it ain’t free) for gamification at a meeting by claiming it links fun and relevant learning is bogus. I’m all for participants having fun, but meeting professionals already know how to create fun experiences at events — we’ve been doing this for a long, long, time.
So don’t buy the claims of gamification vendors. Instead, assign chocolate-dipped broccoli to its proper function…an April Fool’s post.
Are five million Google links wrong? Do you think that event gamification is not chocolate-dipped broccoli? Your thoughts are welcome in the comments below!
Image attribution: from an April Fool’s post on Make It And Love It
How can we design the optimum balance between control versus freedom at meetings? First, let’s get one misconception out of the way. As I wrote in 2010:
The reality is that you never had control to begin with, just the myth of control. You’ve been kidding yourself all these years. Unless your constituency is bound to your event via a requirement to earn CEUs, members can withhold their attendance or avoid sessions at will.
—The myth of control
Note that I’m not suggesting meeting professionals give up any attempt to control what happens at their events. Maintaining control of vital logistics, and having and executing backup plans when unexpected developments occur are core requirements and responsibilities of our job.
It’s when we try to tightly control every aspect of our meetings that our events suffer. Surprisingly, clinging to control is the easy way out. As Dee W Hock, founder and former CEO of VISA, put it:
Any idiot can impose and exercise control. It takes genius to elicit freedom and release creativity.
— Dee W Hock (@deewhock) August 9, 2020
“Any idiot can impose and exercise control. It takes genius to elicit freedom and release creativity.”
—@DeeWHock
To “elicit freedom and release creativity”, we need to recognize that participants are stakeholders in the event, rather than “just” an audience.
Why are they event owners?
“…participants are event owners because, to some extent, they control what happens next.”
—Adrian Segar, Who owns your event?
To create events that truly meet participants’ wants and needs, we need to provide three things:
The first bullet point describes the traditional work of meeting professionals. Our logistical designs control the environment that participants experience. They include flexible, support (plans B – Z) when the unexpected happens. In this arena, we are in control through our careful planning, which includes resources for a wide range of contingencies.
To satisfy the remaining bullet points, we have to give up control. Why? To give participants the freedom to satisfy their wants and needs! To do this, participants need the freedom to choose what they talk about, and whom they talk to and connect with, when it suits them. Our job is to support these activities as much as possible by providing appropriate:
Notice that providing these improvements over traditional meetings doesn’t mean that your meeting will turn out to be wildly different from what took place before. Your event may include sessions that look very similar to what you might have scheduled for a tightly controlled program. The difference is that your participants will have chosen these sessions and formats themselves, not you.
Instead of control versus freedom, choose control and freedom. Assign both to the appropriate characteristics of your event.
That makes all the difference.
For a discussion of control versus freedom in the context of event leadership, you may find this post useful…
What makes attending conferences worthwhile? As I described in Conferences That Work, the two most common reasons for attending conferences are to learn useful things and make useful connections. But there are numerous other ways that conferences provide value to stakeholders. In this post I’ll focus on, arguably, the most useful conferences we can design: those that solve participants’ problems.
![solving participants problems: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) - [1], CC BY-SA 4.0](https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Cynefin_framework_by_Edwin_Stoop-640x249.jpg)
When thinking about solving problems, the Cynefin framework provides a helpful taxonomy of problem types. It’s useful because each Cynefin domain requires a different problem-solving approach. Cynefin describes five domains, usually named as: obvious, complicated, complex, chaotic, and disorder. Check out the above Wikipedia link to learn more about them.
As we’ll see:
Here’s a little more detail on the obvious, complicated, and complex problem domains. For each domain, I’ll include examples of meeting processes you can use to satisfy participants’ problem solving wants and needs.
Obvious problems (“known knowns”) have known solutions, often called “best practice”.
For example, how do I:
These examples might remind you of the kinds of topics that routinely appear as the titles of traditional conference sessions. That’s because these are problems to which experts know the answers, or, at least, have plenty of good advice to share. Their expertise can, therefore, be shared with participants via traditional presentations.
Sadly, traditional lecture-style sessions are only good for solving participants’ obvious problems. What’s more, the session will be of little use unless the session content happens to match a participant’s current problem.
Peer conferences reduce problem solving limitations in the obvious domain, by allowing participants to influence the content and scope of meeting sessions in real time during the event. So it’s much more likely that participants’ top-of-mind obvious problems will be effectively addressed at a peer conference.
Unfortunately, the majority of our day-to-day challenges are not obvious. (That’s why we spend much more time and energy working on them than obvious problems.) Complicated problems (“known unknowns”) succumb to expert analytical judgment.
For example, how can I:
Traditional conference lecture-format sessions provide almost no time for solving participants’ complicated problems. Typically, complicated problems can only be addressed up during a question and answer period at the end of the session, when there is little time to perform the kind of analysis a session expert might be able to supply.
Interactive conference sessions allow more opportunities for participants to share specific complicated problems and get targeted advice. However, few presenters incorporate significant interactivity into their sessions, and this format is more the exception than the rule.
Once again, peer conference sessions provide significantly more ways to solve participants’ complicated problems. There are two reasons for this. First, as above, peer sessions are far more likely to address the actual problems participants are currently facing. And second, peer session formats use the resources in the room — not just the session leadership — to uncover and resolve top-of-mind participant problems. (For more information on how to do this, see my book Event Crowdsourcing: Creating Meetings People Actually Want and Need.)
Complex problems (“unknown unknowns”) are even harder to resolve.
Here are some examples. How should we:
Such problems are complex because we:
Unlike the obvious and complicated domains, we have to approach complex problems by doing experiments. Cynefin describes this process using the word trio [probe–sense–respond], as opposed to the trios for the obvious [sense–categorize–respond], and complicated [sense–analyze–respond] problem domains.
Complex problems have to be tackled in the same way that scientists use experiments to probe the world around us and gradually build understanding of it.
Thus exploring complex problems requires a probing experiment, from which we observe outcomes, and then, with our understanding perhaps slightly improved, we probe in an appropriately different way again. With persistence and luck, over time we may be able to formulate some helpful responses to the problem.
It may seem strange to run experiments at conferences, but I’ve participated in (and designed) a few conference experiments over the years, and have invariably found them to be some of the most interesting and illuminating meeting experiences I’ve ever had.
Here are three session-based examples:
Finally, there are conferences that are entirely experiments!
In the meetings world, the most well known are the series of EventCamps that were held around the world between 2010 and 2014. These were volunteer-run, meeting experiments that explored a wide range of meeting and session formats and technologies. For example, we designed and held some of the earliest hybrid meetings, and introduced the meeting industry to peer conferences, gamification, improv, sustainability issues, and many other, now common, meeting components. These events made a profound impression on pretty much everyone who participated. Many of the people I met remain friends today.
Since 2016, I’ve been participating in the annual, invitation-only Meeting Design Practicum conferences that have been held all over Europe. A rotating crew of two or three volunteers organize these wonderful events. They plan an experimental program and ask participants to contribute in various ways, but are the only people who know the entire program in advance. Truly a unique and different experiment each year!
Conferences that are entire experiments are rare because they are risky. Experiments, by definition, have unpredictable results, which means they may “fail” to produce “desirable” outcomes. The understandable default assumption for most meeting industry clients is that their meetings are “successful”, and clients who are willing for “success” to include novel learning from innovative experiments are rare.
Nevertheless, whether held by the meeting industry for itself or for clients, meeting experiments provide the potential for the participants to work on some of their most difficult problems, those that are complex. Bear this in mind if you see an opportunity to create experimental sessions or events!
Whatever kind of conference you design, remember the value of incorporating sessions and formats that solve participants’ problems. It’s no accident that the experiment-rich Solution Room is the most popular and highly rated plenary I offer. Give your participants opportunities to solve their top-of-mind problems at your meetings and you’ll make them very happy!
Image attribution: Cynefin illustration by Edwin Stoop (User:Marillion!!62) – [1], CC BY-SA 4.0
Last week I immensely enjoyed participating in a two-hour Zoom brain trust on moderating online panels. So good, it should be shared with a wider audience. So here’s a treasury of good ideas and resources we uncovered.
Huge thanks to the conveners and leaders: my friend, team performance and facilitation expert Kristin Arnold, and corporate innovation leader Scott Kirsner.
As you’d expect if you know these folks, the session was very well organized and facilitated. No mean task for a vocal group of 28!
Thank you Scott & Kristin for providing an agenda and (pretty closely) sticking to it! Here it is.
15 mins: Who’s here; what sort of moderating have you been doing?
5 mins: Scott shares some recent learnings from virtual events.
10 mins: Kristin shares some recent learnings from virtual events and a quick overview of what’s in her book.
20 mins: Breakouts (in groups of 4). What are 1-2 of your online moderating pro tips? Capture these on a shared doc (Slido).
10 mins: How did that go? Report back and bio break.
30 mins: Is panel prep different in the virtual world? Speaker recruiting? Tools and techniques for engaging the audience. Debates on burning questions (like chat or no chat, prep call or no prep call, right length.)
30 mins: Additional Q&A and discussion time (if needed).
I usually put these at the end, but because this post incorporates large, sometimes verbatim, chunks of Kristin Arnold’s excellent session notes I want to give her full co-author credit. Any errors and omissions are mine. Kristin’s name appears many times in what follows; some of the comments are hers, and some are her notes on what others said.
While I’m mentioning Kristin, the best resources I know on becoming a first-rate panel moderator are her panel-focused website and short but packed book Powerful Panels. Visit the former and buy the latter!
Some of what follows is verbatim; some is edited by me slightly. Editorial additions/comments are shown in red. When the contributor is known, I’ve added their name (with a link the first time they’re mentioned).
There are two kinds of pre-event calls, though these categories can blur, and might be covered in a single call:
“I call it a ‘production call like you would have if you were going to be on The View or Live with Kelly and Ryan .”
—Glenn Thayer
—Scott Kirsner‘s take
Restrict prerecorded segments to 5 minutes or less. —Adrian Segar
I think pre-recorded lessens the authenticity of the event . —Kelley Kassa
Pre-record sponsor remarks, then the moderator manages the time of everyone else. —Glenn Thayer
What about pre-recorded pitchfests with live founders for Q&A? I’m running a pitchfest tonight… We pre-recorded the pitches (they’re two minutes long). —Glenn Thayer
A virtual MC is a MUST-HAVE. —Thom Singer
Agree, but MC should be more than a security blanket. —Jan-Jaap In der Maur
For sure, I help drive the attendee experience and engagement and deliver on the networking value of the virtual event. Much more than a security blanket. —Sarah Michel
We always assign a breakout room “table captain” pre-hand for who will moderate the breakout room. —Raza Shaikh
Zoom now has the feature to set a room topic too. —Kristin Arnold [I think you’re referring to Zoom Rooms, not Zoom Meetings. The latter has always allowed you to rename breakout rooms to a topic, issue, or group as desired.] • However, EVERYONE in the Zoom room must have the latest version of Zoom downloaded or they won’t see the room options/topics. —Sarah Michel
At what audience size do you find that “all mics open” breaks down? —Andrew Lee Rubinger • Haven’t found a max yet. Did it up to 150 . —Jan-Jaap In der Maur
Integrate breakouts – put a panelist in each of the breakout rooms. —Kristin Arnold
On “intentionality”: I determine the story arc I want to be told in the session. It’s like a jazz performance – it’s all improv, but there are waypoints to hit. —Andrew Lee Rubinger
IME, well-designed problem-solver panels are great and audiences love them. —Adrian Segar
To help ensure that participants know what to do in breakouts when the breakout rooms are open, message them with instructions, time available, etc. Have this prewritten elsewhere, so it can be efficiently pasted into the platform. —Kristin Arnold
Do your research before you talk to the panelists. —Kristin Arnold
Curiosity is key. —Adrian Segar
Record prep call – use those recorded snippets for social media marketing for the live event! —Kristin Arnold [Love this!]
The goal of pre-call is that they feel comfortable enough that they could mock me. —Kristin Arnold
What questions, issues, what are you hoping to get out of this session at the beginning of the chat ? —Kristin Arnold
Know your moderator style. —Kristin Arnold
If you want to be interesting, you have to be interested. —Daniel Seewald
Pre-empt attendee objections. For example, reduce fears about being in breakout rooms with strangers. —Demoed by Scott Kirsner during our session
Engaging the audience is not the same as involving the audience (giving them a task to do). —Kristin Arnold
Ensure your audience knows you care…AND your panelist knows you care. Watched a Comicon panel with Charlize Theron. Initially, she wasn’t engaged. Once the moderator asked questions that really showed she did her homework, she literally leaned in. —Kristin Arnold
I love completely crowdsourcing the panel… —Kristin Arnold [I often do this. See How a Fishbowl Sandwich Can Really Get Your Attendees Talking for more information.]
The best and most engaging moderated event I’ve seen was a workshop on “visual thinking strategies” at the Innovation Leader’s Impact conference, where the moderator of the discussion spent about 45 min having a group discussion about a Picasso painting. She just asked questions about what we saw and what we thought those symbols meant. It was genuinely like being in school — and I think that unusual dynamic made people excited. Then, after that discussion, she shifted to talking about how that could apply to business/corporate settings, and many participants said they were going to integrate what they learned in that session that day. —Lilly Milman
Use shared documents to seek feedback and capture insights from large groups. —Anonymous [During the session we used Slido to capture insights.]
Use object voting. For example: “If you agree, hold up something in your office that’s blue. Neutral or undecided, yellow. Disagree, red.” —Kristin Arnold
Be about something, have a position, and be honest about it. Push up against the walls. Be kind. —Kristin Arnold
Have the panelist give us a tour, give a demo, go get an object (from a trip you have been on). —Kristin Arnold
Give panelists an object and ask them to provide a greater meaning to it. —Kristin Arnold
Coach your panelists on how to use the camera and speak authentically . —Kristin Arnold
I almost always share prep questions with my panelists. Mostly because my panelists are tech people and not always the best speakers . —Kelley Kassa
Provide a loose framework of where we want to go….some potential questions. Any specific questions that need some vetting… —Kristin Arnold
I always try to email topics with the caveat that we’ll ask follow-ups and make it conversational . —Kaitlin Milliken
I like giving the first question so they will be comfortable AND the last question, which can be recorded and edited into a social media snack. —Kristin Arnold
You have to really listen to what your panelists are saying…and make decisions on what to probe further . —Kristin Arnold
Ask panelists to bring one question to the panel to ask each other. —Kristin Arnold
There is NO panel without an audience. —Sarah Michel
In the midst of this global pandemic, people are attending virtual events seeking meaningful connections. We must design panels for that . —Sarah Michel
The moderator is a champion for the audience. Everything has to flow from the audience. How does this make them better people? —Kristin Arnold
IME, audiences love well-designed problem solver panels. —Adrian Segar
Interview the audience before it starts . —Kristin Arnold
Content is not king…it’s context and connections . —Kristin Arnold
Drive to action…run a poll – who do you want to follow up with? —Anonymous
Get to know the functionality of platforms. Offer alternatives. —Kristin Arnold
Use an online poll to start the session. —Anonymous
Leverage chat. It’s gold. Be on chat early and ask the audience to answer a question. Keep the chat open afterward. I have a love/hate relationship with chat as neuroscience says that we aren’t focused on the conversation . —Anonymous
There is a whole business of a production studio in a box that gets sent to a panelist… —Anonymous
Some corporations don’t want casual they want big production. —Anonymous
I’ve gotten the box sent to me for an event. Lots of rehearsals too. —Anonymous
I ask my clients what backgrounds/level of production they want… —Anonymous
Small in-person studio audience and a much larger virtual one. Curate the studio audience… —Sarah Michel
Love asking panel members (or speakers) to change their backgrounds when you want to shift the energy or when you go to live Q&A, etc.
Set up a shared “group notes” document where people can contribute their notes from the panel. You can even give a prize to the best note-taker at the event.
Whatever goes wrong with A/V last time won’t happen next time…relax over technical glitches. They are bound to happen.
Conversations don’t have scripts. There’s a road map of where I want to go but need to go with the conversations.
When clients are technologically not especially comfortable, ask for ONE thing to do vs. the world of possibilities .
Don’t tell your clients everything you will be doing…as they will defend/say no.
Sometimes, a heads-up might be appropriate so they aren’t thrown off .
Ask panelists to stay for networking time between sessions. That way, the audience can meet them and have one on one conversations.
Have panelists ask each other questions – they usually have great questions for each other.
Fireside chats…work with the speaker to cut into small pieces .
Every 6-10 minutes switch gears and do something different .
If an online gathering has less than 20 people, consider starting with introductions. The moderator calls on each name: 15 seconds maximum.
If you’re not a subject matter expert, ask panelists in prep calls: What matters most right now?
What would you tell me about in an elevator?
Put a pillow in your lap if you have a little sound echo in your room .
When there’s content that is very technical, ask questions like “Please explain X as if you’re talking to someone completely unfamiliar with the topic”. [Me: I often open by stating that I know less about the panel topic than anyone else in the room—but I do know how to moderate panels!]
Be punchy, and concise. Less is more. Provide a digestible premise that people are interested in.
Pre-record segments – edit them down into more focused conversations. Or cut at key points and stop to interact .
Use panelists as priming for large group discussions. [See my book “Event Crowdsourcing” and these articles “How a fishbowl sandwich can really get your attendees talking” and “The best way to hold a discussion online“]
To run fishbowl discussions on Zoom, have everyone turn their camera off until they have something to say. When they turn their camera on, they float to the top of Gallery View That makes it easy for the moderator (whose camera is always on) to see who wants to talk. [See third link above.]
Use Zoom breakout rooms for “hallway” conversations after a panel. Put the panelists into one of those rooms after the panel is over so people can “meet” them. [Also consider using online social platforms for breaks and socials.]
Give frequent, small assignments: e.g. write down your biggest challenge. Use that as a start to the conversation.
When you do an A/V check, make sure panelists use the same equipment and time of day!
On Zoom train and teach all people to use the blue hand raise button instead of physically raising the hand . [Depends on group size; I prefer human hand raising if the group is viewable on one screen in Gallery view.]
Ask everyone to keep their camera on as a way of showing respect and being present.
Have a 2nd device ready…like your phone…in case of wifi or Zoom problems.
Pre-record sponsor segments.
Put into chat what you want attendees to do!
Ask people to talk about one favorite object from a trip.
Practice as much as you can and prep for props/interactive elements.
Using visuals and doing things like physically leaning in can engage people and create intimacy.
Think about the audience first.
How to touch people when your event is online —Jan-Jaap In der Maur
Love Mural, having a quick and easy task to begin with to get everyone up to speed helps. —Caitlin Harper [I prefer Miro.]
Use a visual notetaker [aka graphic recorder]! —Caitlin Harper
If you wanna hear about Kristin’s brilliance with the CAPS conference last week…. we interviewed her today on Webinar Talk Show about all their ideas and how they pulled it off. 35-minute interview. Watch it…cuz she had soooo many good points about being engaging. —Thom Singer
Slido for polling and capturing participant ideas/questions/etc.
If you’d like to see what a business partner and I started for people like me who want to PRESENT rather than PRODUCE, visit livestream-denver.com. This is a work in progress and not a sales pitch as we work almost exclusively with clients in the Denver area. —Mark Sanborn
How a fishbowl sandwich can really get your attendees talking —Adrian Segar
The best way to hold a discussion online —Adrian Segar
Anything you want to add, correct, or disagree with in this bounty of advice on moderating online panels? Share in the comments below!
One of the best and simplest ways to build active learning and connection into any meeting is to regularly use pair share. (See Chapter 38 of The Power of Participation, or Chapter 27 of Event Crowdsourcing for full details.) I’ve recently noticed that in some circumstances, trio share — pair share but with three participants — works better.
Pair share has a lot going for it. It’s the most efficient way to ensure that every participant periodically switches into active learning, which, as explained in The Power of Participation, provides:
Pair share duration is minimal. I commonly allow each partner a minute to share their response. Including instructions, a typical pair share might take around three minutes. Getting every participant to actively think and respond to a question or issue in this time pays rich dividends.
A trio share takes longer than a pair share, given the same sharing time per participant. The example above would require at least an extra minute. I say “at least” because it generally takes longer (at least at in-person meetings) to create trios than pairs.
In addition, the conversational directness and intensity may be less in a trio share, since each participant is talking to two people instead of one.
On the other hand, each participant is connecting with two other people, rather than one.
None of these differences is a deal breaker. In the past, I have tended to use pair share, simply because my time with participants is limited and pair shares are quicker.
Since the coronavirus pandemic, however, I’ve noticed something new.
Ultimately, you can’t force adult attendee participation. Nevertheless, at in-person meetings it’s rare to have people sit out pair sharing. The reason, of course, is unspoken social pressure. Anyone choosing not to participate is obvious to the people around them.
When the coronavirus pandemic forced meetings online, I began to see more people avoiding session pair shares. I’d allocate pairs into Zoom breakout rooms, and, quite often, one or two people didn’t join their allocated room but stayed in the Zoom lobby.
As the host, I’d gently check in with those remaining behind. Sometimes they hadn’t accepted the breakout room assignment and would do so. But more often than not, it turned out they were absent (it’s hard to tell when their camera’s off).
Their unfortunate partners who went into the breakout room had no one to talk to!
At in-person meetings, this is easy to handle. I ask anyone without a partner to raise their hand, and then pair up isolated people.
Online, this takes too much time, and those without a partner suffer.
So I’ve started using trio share for online meetings. There are two reasons.
First, trio share reduces the impact on “orphaned” participants. If one person in a trio doesn’t join, the remaining pair can still reap the benefits of pair share.
And second, trio share gently increases social pressure for attendees to participate. Bowing out of pair share affects one other person. Avoiding a trio share affects two.
Whatever you do, some people will opt out of small group work. Their reasons are — their reasons. We need to accept that. Switching to trio share for online work is a small tweak that seems to improve participation. And creating a meeting environment where small group work is more likely to occur is always worthwhile.
What’s your experience of using pair share and/or trio share at in-person and online meetings? Please share in the comments!
The most popular of the in-person sessions I design and facilitate is The Solution Room (here are some testimonials). The 90 – 120 minute session, for 20 – 600 people, engages and connects participants, and provides just-in-time peer support and answers to their most pressing professional challenges. These days, wouldn’t it be great to run The Solution Room online? Well, you can!
I’ve described in detail how to run The Solution Room at in-person meetings in my last two books: The Power of Participation & Event Crowdsourcing. The latter has the most up-to-date instructions, but either book should suffice. (Don’t have a copy? For the price of a sandwich you can buy either ebook.) So this post covers just the changes you’ll need to make to hold this highly-rated plenary session on an online/virtual platform.
To run The Solution Room online you’ll need:
The Solution Room facilitator follows the “How?” section of the relevant chapter in The Power of Participation (Chapter 34) or Event Crowdsourcing (Chapter 23) with the following modifications.
In advance of the session, ask participants to have available a method of creating a drawing to share with their small group. Provide detailed options, so they know how they’re going to create their drawing and how they’ll share it.
Before starting, have your staff check that every participant is displaying their name in the participant list.
Introduce The Solution Room, and provide the link to the shared Google Sheet years-of-experience sheet (here’s my sample Sheet). Ask participants to think of their challenge, and then enter their Zoom name in the column headed by their number of years of experience.
Once everyone has entered their years of experience, your staff can calculate the number of breakout rooms needed. While you continue, staff pre-assigns participants to breakout room tables using the information in the Google Sheet.
The sample Google Sheet contains twenty participants. So if we are using a table size of seven, we will need three breakout rooms. Your staff will, therefore, go through the Sheet from the left, down each column, and then to the right, assigning each participant a number between 1 and 3. For the example, the three tables will be:
#1: Julio Melia, Marvin Brentwood, Elizabeth Strong, Gurdeep Mac, Liliana Hoffman, Ivor Rennie, Zahrah Valenzuela
#2: Harold Kormann, Fergus Roth, Khi Suliman, Bayley Sims, Arian Faulkner, Alayah Hurley, Adrian Segar, Tyriq Kenny
#3: John Smith, Mario Fernandez, Selina Hatherton, Malaika Byers, Inigo Tyler
Each table contains a mixture of years of experience, from novice to veteran.
Run the comfort spectrogram, sharing your campfire and jungle images at the appropriate times. If you have a polling instrument, ask each participant to rate their pre-exercise comfort level on working on their challenge on a scale of 1 (extremely uncomfortable) to 10 (perfectly comfortable) and to enter their rating. No polling instrument? Simply ask them to remember their rating.
While everyone is still together, give the mindmapping instructions and give participants a few minutes to create their drawings. Ask participants to turn off their cameras, raise their hands, or provide some other signal that they have finished. Tell them they can use private chat with the facilitator or staff if they have any questions.
When it’s time for table sharing to start, provide the instructions for table sharing. Answer any questions, and then move participants to their breakout room tables, or tell them their table number and have them move there.
Use broadcast messages to provide the midway, two-minute, and time’s up announcements. At the start of the last sharing round, remind tables with one empty seat to use the time for additional consulting.
Ask everyone to thank their table colleagues for their advice and support. Allow a couple of minutes for this, and then bring everyone back together.
Display the jungle and campfire images and run the second comfort spectrogram. If using a polling instrument, compare the pre- and post- comfort distributions. Otherwise, you can ask people to raise their hand for three options in turn: their comfort level increased, stayed the same, or decreased.
If desired, run the likelihood that participants will work to overcome the challenge they just shared.
Finally, if you have time and the inclination, take some sharing about the exercise, using an appropriate “who goes next” protocol.
That’s it! If you run The Solution Room online, please feel free to share your experience in the comments below.
I first reviewed (1, 2) three online conference social platforms: Gatherly, Rally, and Wonder (the new name for Yotribe since September) in 2020. Since then, the Gatherly and Rally developers have been hard at work! [2023 update: Wonder went out of business in 2023.] So here’s a review of updated versions of Gatherly and Rally, including comparisons with the former Wonder service.
If this is your first exposure to online social platforms, the “First, some context…” section of the Gatherly/Yotribe review explains what they’re all about, and why they are important new additions to any serious online meeting. (For another, surprisingly neutral, perspective check out this Rally blog post.)
Also, read the above earlier reviews in full, so you understand the basic features and scope of these online social platforms.
As in my earlier reviews, I’ll focus on different aspects of the platforms, and provide information and commentary on each.
Not much has changed here since Gatherly and Rally rely on the same underlying WebRTC technology. Both vendors recommend attendees use Chrome on a laptop/PC, not a mobile device. The platforms all work to some extent in Firefox, but Safari is not recommended.
One tip is to access Gatherly and Rally in an incognito/private window. This minimizes conflicts with any installed browser extensions/add-ons.
In addition, using these platforms on corporate LANs may require asking a sysadmin to allow the platform streams through a corporate firewall. Test before your event!
Bandwidth requirements are typically higher than those needed by, say, a Zoom meeting, since the fluid video-chat connections involve multiple video streams to each device on the platform, rather than the single consolidated feed used in platforms like Zoom and Teams. However, I’m in a rural location with only DSL and cellular connectivity and have only had a few transitory problems using these platforms.
When I last reviewed Gatherly, the platform required Gatherly staff to set up and customize each event. Rally and Yotribe, on the other hand, were usable as soon as you had a venue.
Gatherly has since added extensive capabilities to build and customize your meetings, via their VESTA tool. This is welcome news since the lack of a “plug-and-play” online meeting setup was a barrier to holding meetings on the platform. The following screenshots illustrate many of VESTA’s useful new features.
Gatherly hosts can now create multiple events with open/close times, and use PowerPoint to customize an event’s floor backgrounds from a variety of templates. The VESTA portal also provides convenient links to the latest Gatherly guide, tutorial videos, a customizable event brochure template, and a speed test. Later in this post, I’ll describe the pricing model and event analytics included in VESTA.
Soon after my June revue, Gatherly added unlimited “floors”, akin to Rally’s rooms, with “elevators” to move between them.
Rally has added multiple new customization features since my June review. You can now change the background of your Rally venue and each of your rooms. Rally now allows multiple venue hosts, so it’s easier to collaborate when setting up rooms and features. A convenient drop down makes it simple to transfer between rooms. In addition, rooms and venues can be edited on the fly, making it easy to add/remove/close/open rooms, while an event is going on.
Formerly, Rally’s “improve connection” feature removed the attendee from the meeting so they had to rejoin, answering the same sign on questions as before. This no longer occurs.
Rally can now “archive” a room, so its customizations can now be recalled when needed.
Yotribe gave you a room instantly on signing up. Currently, this is no longer true for Wonder. At the time of writing this review, I am still waiting for a Wonder room I requested a week ago. So I haven’t been able to check out Wonder firsthand.
All guests are now in one room, rather than adding more “areas” when the number of people in any area exceeds 36. The home page says: “Wonder rooms can host up to 1,500 guests.” Wonder’s Support FAQ says: “There is no technical limitation to how many guests may fit into one room. If you have more than 2,000 guests it might make sense to run two rooms in parallel.” Either limit is probably ample for most events; the more pertinent issue is how well Wonder works with many attendees.
Wonder now includes room areas, which can be set up by the host. Examples are the Business Tech, Education & Training, and Grant Programs areas shown below. They can be added on the fly, either before or during the meeting.
In addition, you can add a background image to your Wonder room.
Gatherly can’t broadcast to more than one floor. The company says that the platform handles ~150 people/floor, so broadcasting to a single floor will be fine for many events. Gatherly recommends providing a floor for every hundred attendees. You can, of course add more floors if you want to devote each one to a specific meeting function.
Gatherly hopes to introduce broadcasting to multiple floors in early 2021.
When running a recent event in Gatherly, we noticed that the list of attendees, a very useful feature, showed only the first 60 names. Apparently, this limitation is still in place. I hope they fix this soon since it’s impossible to see and contact every attendee at an event with more than 60 people.
Like Gatherly, Rally still doesn’t provide a single stage for multiple rooms. This is more of a limitation for Rally, though, as the maximum room size is 35 people. So you can’t currently create a presenter or panel session for more than 35 people. A Rally spokesperson told me that the platform can be set up to support up to 50 people per room, but this requires turning off the background chatter feature. Rally says that people on stage need less bandwidth now, allowing eight people simultaneously.
Wonder has added video broadcasting, where all participants see the host’s video stream. While broadcasting is taking place, individual video chats are halted. Up to six people can broadcast simultaneously, and all of them must be authenticated as a host.
Gatherly is using two pricing plans, One-Off and Annual, both based on a ticket system, administered in VESTA, that determines the cost of each event you set up. The company is finalizing ticket and annual plan pricing and expects to make this information public shortly.
Rally has published the following pricing.
Like Gatherly, if you’re planning large events, you’ll need to contact Rally for custom pricing.
Wonder pricing is easy; it’s still free! I don’t know how the company can afford to keep providing this service for free, as the bandwidth and server costs for running multiple video stream meetings are higher than services like Skype, FaceTime, and Zoom, and someone’s got to pay them. Feel free to use Wonder for now (assuming you can get a room) but don’t rely on it being free forever.
Up to 1,000 people per event, ~150 per floor (not a hard limit, but recommended); 5 or unlimited floors, depending on plan; up to 15 people per huddle (group chat); 7-8 on stage; currently, people tab shows a maximum of 60 people.
“2000+” people per event; 9 people per table; a maximum of 35 people per room (50 people per room is available in beta); up to ~8 per room panel; the number of rooms depends on the plan.
1 room per venue; maximum room size 1,500 attendees? (see above); up to 15 people per circle; a maximum of 15 room areas; up to 6 people can broadcast simultaneously.
Gatherly and Rally make similar privacy and data security claims, regarding the underlying data services.
Gatherly events can have a unique, event-specific URL and password, which provides decent security. An attendee will need to know the correct URL, password, and open times for a specific event.
Access to a Rally venue simply involves providing attendees an unchanging URL tied to the venue. You don’t need a password. (Password-protected rooms are “in the works”.) Once someone has this URL, they will have access to the venue at any time it is open. Like Gatherly, Rally allows hosts to choose when rooms are open, so someone with the URL cannot use a venue, as long as you close the venue room(s) when an event is over. If you are using a Rally venue frequently, you could be visited by someone who has been given the venue URL for an earlier event and decided to “pop in” and see if anything is going on. Rally corporate users can request Single Sign-On, which limits attendees to those with the same company domain.
Access to a Wonder room simply involves providing attendees an unchanging URL to the room. You can password-protect a Wonder room. Once someone has the URL and password, they will have access to the venue at any time until you change the password. Frankly, this is like giving people a key to your home that they can use when you’re not there, and I consider it poor security.
Gatherly’s VESTA portal includes an intriguing feature: event analytics. Here’s a screenshot of a typical event.
Rally says they can track “time in room per person, what room they visited, how long they were on stage for, how many people were in the room at once, how many uniques, and more”, and provide this information on request.
Both Gatherly and Rally are fine platforms that are already useful. I continue to be impressed by the fast pace of development from both of these companies. Wonder’s biggest advantage is that, for now, it’s free. I’m not sure that I would pay a significant amount to use it, though.
Gatherly and Rally have one annoying limitation, which, in my understanding, is unlikely to be removed soon. Many online event conveners would like to use a platform like Zoom for their “main” conference, switching to an online social platform for program breaks and socials. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to run two platforms simultaneously on one computer, because each needs exclusive access to camera, microphone, and output sound. Attendees must, therefore, close one platform before opening the other. This is awkward and requires careful pre-event attendee education.
I’m sure Gatherly and Rally have some concerns that a major online event platform will build a good-enough online social capability into their product. Right now, I strongly recommend anyone who wants to provide experiences close to those of an in-person social at their online events seriously investigate these platforms.
Here are my current thoughts about COVID-19, hybrid meetings, and the future. Earlier this year I wrote:
Unfortunately, it currently looks like one potential short-term improvement outcome, containment, will not be successful. In the long term, however, the current turmoil caused by the spread of COVID-19 is likely to subside. The development and introduction of an effective and affordable vaccine may bring the virus under control. Or, enough people may get COVID-19 and develop an immune response, leading to herd immunity.
Eventually, the coronavirus is most likely to either burn out or return seasonally, like influenza.
I am not focusing on hybrid meetings at the moment. Why? Because I see little if any, benefit of holding in-person meetings at this time. When we can have in-person meetings safely without masks or 6′ social distancing, I expect to be designing for two basic kinds of hybrid meetings.
COVID-19 has temporarily suppressed the market for hybrid meetings, but I believe their future is bright!