If you suck at designing and facilitating meatspace meetings, then – everything else being equal – you are probably going to suck big hairy dog’s balls at online meetings.
Is it just me? (1) Am I the only one who has been in several really painfully bad online meetings during this lockdown? Where the organisers clearly have given NO THOUGHT to what could or should be different. They’ve just shifted their dismal “in real life” formats over to Zoom. And guess what, they’re still dismal! Hoodathunkit? But as long as the invited guest speakers get to treat everyone as ego-fodder, as long as the punters can feel they were close to Wisdom, or that they’re not losing touch, then everyone seems happy.
It’s as if the opportunities of online spaces (I’ll come back to them) are being very very consciously ignored. There’s something skeuomorphic – the online meetings consciously replicating/signalling their continuity with the old formats which, well have nostalgia and soothe value (if not use value).
Why? Again, trying to think systematically rather than continuing the Fundamental Attribution Error of ascribing cowardice/laziness/stupidity.
- Most organisers are not familiar with what online meetings might offer
- Most organisers are not willing to take the risk of innovating at the best of times, and right now, it’s not the best of times. (insert rant about fear eating the soul, helmet fires yadda yadda).
- Most organisers are under no selection pressure to DO BETTER. Any old crap will do at the minute (insert rant about the smugosphere) because most punters have never had better, and would be reluctant to demand it in these times when everyone is (understandably and rightly) cutting other folks lots of slack.
Okay, now I have got my tokenistic and entirely abstract compassion tokens sorted: this.
DO BETTER, YOU FUCKERS.
At the least
- Ask yourself: why gather people together for an hour and spend the first third of that asking them to, in effect, watch a youtube together? Srsly. Have your speakers pre-record and upload their initial statements. That way they are not speaking off the cuff, they can be kept to time. Tell everyone to watch the damn things before. Most will, some won’t.
- Be concise and clear in your opening statements. There is no excuse for waffling, and the consequences for it are HIGHER online, imo.
- Encourage people to use the ‘chat’ function. That is what it is there for (affordances schmafordances). This is NOT like a meatspace meeting where the chattering will be disruptive. It’s an online meeting. Only Connect, as that old English dude said.
- If you are going to go into breakout groups, then have the instructions for this – what it is you are expecting each group to do – on a slide.
- For any reporting back, ask the groups to make a slide of their own, rather than verbal feedback. People can read faster than they can listen.
- Think about having a googledoc to which people can properly add comments in real time, reading suggestions etc. The “chat with everyone” function is okay, but it is inaccessible once the meeting is over. You can edit/polish the googledoc, before the rest of the world sees it, to remove anything libellous/confusing etc.
- DO A POSTMORTEM. Ask people who leave early to tell you why they did. Have a mechanism for everyone to give anonymous feedback (the only kind worth collecting.)
- ITERATE> INNOVATE> ALWAYS IN BETA> THIS IS THE WORLD WIDE WEB, PEOPLE.
- Oh, and if your organisation is named after someone super super SUPER cool, but unjustly obscure, then explain who they are. The world really does need to know.
Yes, I am going to “put up”. The group I am involved in is going to start to do more regular online meetings. We will get things wrong, obvs. But at least we will be trying to actually use the technology in less grotesquely inadequate ways than I’ve described above. FFS.
Footnotes
(1) That’s a semi-rhetorical question. I know very few people who share my vocal, vehement, vivid disdain for suboptimal (“shitty”) meetings. There should be more, but most people seem to shrug their shoulders and say ‘this is the way it’s always been’. While calling for fundamental immediate transformations of our polity and economy. Go figure.
marchudson.net 
Leave a comment