Moving Boulder Open Coffee Online
/Earlier this morning we held our first online Boulder Open Coffee (BOC) in its 13 year history. It required a bit of research ahead of time, so I thought I’d share what I learned. I hope these notes are helpful to other Open Coffee organizers and event organizers in general!
What’s BOC?
This is an informal group for anyone interested in the startup community, particularly those with an interest in technology. We've been meeting regularly since 2007.
There’s more on the Boulder Open Coffee Meetup page.
Some Context
We had 21 people attend today, which is right in line with our usual in-person attendance. We also had a similar mix of attendees as our in-person events, with ~30% of the group having never attended a BOC before.
Technology: Zoom
I tried out three services before choosing to go with Zoom, which I was very happy with:
Very familiar: almost all BOC attendees used this tool already
Is too lightweight: other than chat there aren’t features that allow people to express themselves without talking
Feature rich and offers a high degree of control
Great for conference talks, broadcast style events
Requires too much control: the host has to invite people to speak, which is too onerous for the back and forth dynamic that we’re used to in a BOC conversation
Feature rich (more on that below)
Has the right balance of control that allows for free flowing conversation
In choosing Zoom, I opted for the Pro instead of the Free tier for $15/month since our sessions run an hour; the Free tier is limited to 40 minutes.
Many thanks to my partner in crime and co-worker Kate Moore for test driving these services with me. And many thanks to our employer MojoTech for sponsoring BOC and paying for Zoom!
Features to Use
I invested a couple of hours learning about Zoom features to prepare for our first remote meeting. The most helpful features included commonly used ones as well as a few that I hadn’t run across.
Note: many of these features have to be activated in Settings for new Zoom accounts like mine.
Password Protection & Meetup RSVPs
Zoombombing has been in the news quite a bit, so I thought I’d trade off a little ease of entry into the meeting for some assurance that we wouldn’t have malicious attendees dropping in. When you enable password protection on a Zoom meeting, you’re provided a link that has the password embedded in the URL. When this link is used it doesn’t require manual password entry.
I converted our Meetup event into an online version and added the Zoom link with embedded password. Those who RSVP “yes” to the event receive the link. This felt like the right combination of easy of entry without making access to Zoom easily crawlable by Zoombombers.
Chat & Save Chat
We used chat heavily, especially to share links to useful information. At the beginning of the meeting I asked attendees to include a short summary with each link so that others would be able to find things quickly in our chat history.
Lesson learned: attendees only see chat history starting from when they joined the meeting, so those who showed up a few minutes after we got started had to ask for a few things to be reposted.
We shared a lot of great information with each other. So much that it was impossible to digest it all, which made the Save Chat feature invaluable. In the chat window, open the menu in the bottom right by clicking on the ellipsis and selecting “Save chat”, which dumps a .txt file onto your machine for future reference.
Reactions
Enabling reactions allowed attendees to signal 👏and 👍during a conversation without interrupting. Nice.
Gallery View
I was able to use Gallery View, otherwise known as the Brady Bunch View, so that I’d be able to see as many faces as possible. I rely quite a bit on reading body language when I moderate so I found this very helpful.
Note: I ran the meeting from my 13” Macbook Pro. Gallery View showed me 20 people at a time. When we peaked at 21 attendees, I had to scroll left and right to check on everybody. Overall this worked very well for me.
Polls
I conduct the occasional informal poll with a show of hands during in-person versions of BOC. While I’m able to do those on the fly in person, I found that difficult to do in Zoom while I was moderating the conversation and monitoring chat.
That said, Zoom allows you to prepare poll questions ahead of time and launch them to attendees whenever you want. I took advantage of this to prepare the questions “Have you been to BOC before?” and “How are you feeling today?” before the meeting. I launched the poll when we opened the meeting to give people something to do while the other attendees trickled in.
Moderation Style
Using the same moderation style for our online meeting and our in-person meetings worked much better than I expected it to.
I tell people that they should jump into conversations without raising their hand or otherwise asking for permission to get involved whenever they’re comfortable doing so. When they’re not, or they’re having trouble finding an entry point into a conversation, they can raise their hand, make eye contact with me, or give me some other signal to get my help.
As it turns out, chat seemed to give enough people an alternative to speaking that nobody really needed to rely on me to get them involved. A nice win for meeting remotely.
My intuition tells me that at 21 attendees we’re nearing the threshold where it may require a bit more active moderation, but we’ll continue to use this freer flowing approach until we have to make a change.
A Hybrid Approach
The ability to join BOC remotely has been requested many times over the course of our 13 year history but it’s never come to fruition until today. Now that we’ve conducted this experiment successfully, there’s already talk of keeping the remote option when we’re meeting in person again. I look forward to that day.
If you’re interested in starting an Open Coffee in your community, I’ve shared some additional notes here.
To my fellow event organizers, I hope I’ve included a helpful tidbit or two in this post - good luck!