A Digital Hub Meeting - What Did We Learn?
Authors: Linny Wood & Sumana Banerjee
The Living Deltas Hub digital meeting - 5th March 2021
The first week of March 2021 saw the Living Deltas Hub Digital Annual Meeting take place. Long forgotten were the plans to be in Vietnam enjoying the sights of Phu Quoc and instead Hub members joined over zoom from bedrooms, living rooms and other nooks and crannies of their homes to come together to share progress and plans.
So, what did we learn from an organising an online meeting with of this scale and scope?
You can’t plan too much.
Every piece of advice we received about organising a large online meeting was the same, plan, plan, plan some more, and they were right. Despite the spreadsheets and weekly planning meetings in the months leading up to the event, we were still clarifying details with speakers, organising breakouts and setting up Padlets up to and during the meeting. This is the same face to face, but it is easier to catch someone in a coffee break than it is to find them in a sea of zoom.
Multi-tasking is key
There is a lot to do at once, Zoom chat, Teams chat, E-mail, Padlet, WhatsApp, all are requiring attention at the same time. Not to mention running sessions, engaging with sessions and absorbing the information. You need a good team of people working together and sharing the load, and you need some humour and a few extra cups of coffee to get you through!
People will show up
With a face-to-face meeting you have flights booked and hotel rooms reserved, so you know who will show up. No matter how many online forms someone completes and e-mail reminders they receive there is always doubt that with the many conflicting priorities some people will not show. It turns out they will! If this was an event that was important in person, people will still show up on line. We made sure to fit with everyone’s time zones – with main sessions 3 hours a day over 5 days and over 80 people showed up every day.
Revise expectations
While in face-to-face meetings, one can expect participation from members during the entire day, it is best to not expect the same from everyone in online meetings. Connectivity issues can affect some members from attending all the online sessions. In face-to-face meetings, one can devote their time and attention to the meeting, but in online sessions, there may be times when members have to leave early or join late to take classes or finish other academic and administrative tasks. Also, the scope of scheduling bilateral and trilateral catch-ups during the meeting week is limited since people spread across time zones have to get back to their lives outside the online meetings.
Mix-it up
The Hub is organised into disciplinary Workpackages, so most of the business of the meeting needed to be in these groups, there were decisions to be made, and plans to be formed that needed to be at that level. However wherever possible we broke away from these groups to encourage interdisciplinarity and allowed people to mix with others that they might not usually get to talk to. This is the aspect that was missing from the digital meeting, no bumping into people over breakfast, coffee or dinner and striking up a conversation. The feedback we received was that people really appreciated this, and would have liked more of it.
Use digital tools – but not too many
We made use of Padlet, Mentimeter and Zoom and that was just about right. We pushed Padlet to its limit trying to collect data in 16 breakouts at the same time, and there is always a risk that people will focus on the tool rather than the discussion and outputs. It is important to use these tools to encourage collaborative working, thinking and sharing of ideas, but don’t let them take over. Sometimes a word document will do. Using an interactive tool like Mentimeter proved invaluable to keeping attention and checking in with everyone each day. Not to forget, the exchanges and responses recorded on Padlet and Mentimeter are now rich data already compiled in Excel sheets waiting to be cleaned and analysed.
Don’t forget some fun
We originally had grand plans of cook offs and film clubs with every day being jam-packed. In the end we had to accept our limitations and ensure that the main business of the meeting still took centre stage. That being said we managed a few “get to know you” exercises every day, finding out where we all were, what we would all cook for each other, and what we could see from our windows. We held a quiz where we learned who was a budding sword maker, and who was an extra on the film Out of Africa, and who dined with pirates. We also squeezed in a Bollywood dance lesson, providing just a smidge of the social interaction we all missed.
The bottom line…
A lot can be achieved online, you can have good engagement and collaboration, people are willing to try new things to make it work you can have creative socials and some fun. We also can’t deny that we saved time and money not travelling around the world and we made significant carbon and water savings. That being said we overwhelmingly missed the face-to-face interaction, the in between the moments and the friendships that form at in person meetings, no matter how much you plan these can’t be replicated on Zoom.
