A large online meeting
May. 30th, 2020 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcApproximately annually, at work we run the occasional large meeting, typically over three days, so that our users, developers and other interested parties can come together, talk to us, learn about how to use our software, tell everyone about how they are using it, we can plan future work, etc. With the pandemic we shifted this to being online via Zoom.
The meeting worked rather well, admittedly better than I had expected. I did miss one part of the previous meetings that I like, the ad-hoc small-group conversations in between sessions. Still, I believe that the effort was well worth it. Further, some mentioned that it is far more possible for them to attend online things, even ordinarily. We got to see and hear from each other and it is good to be able to put faces to the names we see in the support fora subsequently.
There were probably around eighty attendees in the main sessions and maybe around twenty in the workshops I was helping to run. My main jobs there were to check people against the registration list in shuffling them from the waiting room into the meeting and to keep track of questions from the chat to make sure nothing important was missed by the speaker; on lucky occasions I could field them myself.
Participants were worldwide, ranging from Australia through Asia and Europe to the Americas, so sessions were timed accordingly: on Thursday, workshops I helped with included a 11h to 13h one then, later, a repeat of it from 21h to 23h which attracted people from North America. I have taken this coming Monday and Friday off work as part of recovery but I know that some of my colleagues put much more than I into the meeting. I hope that they are sleeping well this weekend.
The meeting worked rather well, admittedly better than I had expected. I did miss one part of the previous meetings that I like, the ad-hoc small-group conversations in between sessions. Still, I believe that the effort was well worth it. Further, some mentioned that it is far more possible for them to attend online things, even ordinarily. We got to see and hear from each other and it is good to be able to put faces to the names we see in the support fora subsequently.
There were probably around eighty attendees in the main sessions and maybe around twenty in the workshops I was helping to run. My main jobs there were to check people against the registration list in shuffling them from the waiting room into the meeting and to keep track of questions from the chat to make sure nothing important was missed by the speaker; on lucky occasions I could field them myself.
Participants were worldwide, ranging from Australia through Asia and Europe to the Americas, so sessions were timed accordingly: on Thursday, workshops I helped with included a 11h to 13h one then, later, a repeat of it from 21h to 23h which attracted people from North America. I have taken this coming Monday and Friday off work as part of recovery but I know that some of my colleagues put much more than I into the meeting. I hope that they are sleeping well this weekend.
