Results

Jon Dallas

Creator of Real Talk Philosophy,

An events organization that put on social mixers centered around different topics. Events would include presentations, performances, small group discussions, and games.

COVID forced Jon to move events online as large gatherings were prohibited.

I talked with Jon on May 31st to discuss his experiences adapting to being online.

• He ran over 50+ events with large groups attending on the Zoom platform.
• Allowed participants to mute or unmute themselves. He found it very difficult to be running the event and paying attention to the hands. That was not a clear system for organizing audience interaction.
• He finds the chat messy and doesn’t like that there wasn’t a way for participants to submit an image in any simple way to the meeting. He wondered if they might have fixed that now though.
• There was no easy way to communicate with all groups when they are in their breakout rooms.
• Wanted an internal way to set up and play games. He was having participants go external to a jam board site to play some simple games.

Cindy Do

Worked for a software company with 19k+ employees, where they had quarterly all-employee meetings. Everyone would be muted but could send questions into the chat. At the end of the meeting, someone moderating would select participants from the chat to ask their questions. But the chat could get overrun with messages so it was a bit messy.

Also did an online certification training with around 20 people.

Believes for training, it is important to have both times for participants to listen (without interruption) and times for their engagement.