On 10 August 2021, our club had a trial run of a “Hybrid Meeting” for the first time in our club’s history.
- Why hybrid meeting?
After the first lock-down due to the Corona pandemic, just like many other people and businesses, Isar-Speak could only organise our regular Toastmasters meetings online via Zoom. In this online mode, we could also luckily gain more club members who are not directly living in Munich.Now that the situation in Germany has become much better than in year 2020, our club can organise a face-to-face meeting again, even though some hygienic rules still have to be respected. In order to enable the online participation of our remote members, we decided to check the possibility of having a “Hybrid Meeting”
.- How does the set-up of a Hybrid Meeting look like? We needed the following items…
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One webcam - for the speaker to be set up in front of the speaker on stage
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One projector - for the view of Zoom Meeting for the audience in the room
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One speakerphone - to be placed near the speaker so that remote participants can follow the speeches on stage and the audience in the room can hear remote speakers properly.
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Two computers - one to be connected with the gadgets mentioned above, the other to log in to the Zoom meeting as an online participant to show the audience in the room to remote participants - Is the set-up difficult? According to our first experience, the set-up needs around 30 minutes. This means that the officers, especially the sergeant at arms, should arrive at the meeting venue at least 30 minutes before the meeting starts. The longer the better for unexpected issues.
- How was the impression?
For us personally, it was a great combination of online and face-to-face experiences. We really missed the sound of applauds as we normally used to have in a regular meeting, and we were extremely happy that our online participants had a great impression of the meeting. And now… the photos here can surely give you some impressions of how our hybrid meeting on 10 August looked like. Enjoy, and hope to welcome you in our future club meetings
