Online Meetings
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People are accustomed to meeting and organizing on virtual platforms
It's difficult to believe that before the pandemic, virtual meetings were still a relative novelty. Sure, we had Skype (remember them?) but that was more often used to connect with your granny living thousands of miles away. Today, we're meeting over Zoom with people sitting literally in the next room.
From the NET community organizing perspective, there are both pros and cons to plan around. On the plus side, meeting online reduces obstacles to NET participation. Where a parent used to have to book childcare to take part in a NET meeting, now they can join online. Where someone who doesn't speak English fluently might feel self conscious requesting live interpretation, it's simpler for PBEM to detail a live interpreter to an online meeting. Where a less committed ATV might groan at the prospect of getting off the couch to go meet with neighbors, joining online may feel more palatable. And so on.
There are a few problems as well:
- There's an old saw that 80% of communication is nonverbal. That may oversimplify thing a bit, but the notion is still relevant. Even if online communication doesn't deaden nonverbal communication it does stymie it. Blotting nonverbal communication makes misunderstandings and misfired social behaviors more likely. [1]
- AI bots are taking notes. Some of you may have noticed that folks are sending surrogate bots to take notes instead of arriving themselves. I think any reasonable person would agree that doesn't constitute "active participation". But it's better than not participating at all.
- Virtual meetings make hands-on team training more challenging, though certainly not impossible.
My position is that meeting online is not as good as meeting in person, but that online meetings are here to stay and teams should accommodate neighbors who need to use it. PBEM recommends that NET teams, team leaders, and PBEM address challenges:
- PBEM should help develop best practices for NETs to do hybrid meetings. Hybrid meetings are still challenging, but they're getting easier.
- PBEM encourages each team to get their own free Google Meet account. PBEM can no longer support a paid Zoom account for NET (though we are retaining a single Zoom account that NETs might use for exceptionally large, long, or complicated meetings).
- NET Team Leaders should accept that not all volunteers (active NET/BEECN/ATV) will participate in person. But they can/should reasonably request occasional "all hands" in person meetings.
- PBEM should work with NETs/FPN to develop team training/exercise curriculum that can work for online and hybrid audiences.
- ↑ No joke, just a couple weeks ago, I was in a neighborhood association hybrid meeting where everyone was being chill until one person ("Person A") at the table stood up and started angrily yelling at someone online and off camera ("Person B") because the latter participant's tone and meaning were completely misunderstood. Not only that, but I speculate Person A would not have expressed themselves so aggressively if Person B had been there in person.