I think my experience is that in every medium (Gather Town, Topia, Zoom Breakout) we have successfully hit several good long-lasting conversations. There’s a convo lasting now in Topia that’s still going strong, an hour later.
Overall I think it’s been going acceptably, where I think like 70% of the attendees have had a good experience in most places.
The main thing with Zoom rooms is that the participants can’t really change rooms. You can make everyone co-hosts, but IME it’s still hard for them. So you have to randomly assign rooms, and do constant overhead work to make sure each room is going okay. It takes more overhead and is less bottom-up than the 2D spaces. But also, the level of commitment I think on average has forced conversations to get started and for people to commit to them? So it might actually be the best?
I think the 2d-space-video-chat thing is kinda love/hate, and one solution is just:
Start the event in Zoom, do the main talks in Zoom
At the end, people who prefer hanging out in Zoom stay in Zoom (maybe starting with randomized breakout rooms, which can gradually collapse back to the main Zoom Room when they get boring?)
People who prefer a 2d-space app go there and mill about (able to rejoin the main Zoom room if they want). This probably also helps solve some of the load on the 2d-space-app
The last app I tried out, which I was fairly optimistic about, was called Knit, which was not a 2d-space app, just a videocall running on Jitsi that included “people and form and join their own breakout rooms willy.” Unfortunately it also ran into some connection problems (I guess for similar reasons to why the 2d-space apps sometimes do), so it wasn’t actually an improvement over Zoom.
Yeah, you raise a good point.
I think my experience is that in every medium (Gather Town, Topia, Zoom Breakout) we have successfully hit several good long-lasting conversations. There’s a convo lasting now in Topia that’s still going strong, an hour later.
Overall I think it’s been going acceptably, where I think like 70% of the attendees have had a good experience in most places.
The main thing with Zoom rooms is that the participants can’t really change rooms. You can make everyone co-hosts, but IME it’s still hard for them. So you have to randomly assign rooms, and do constant overhead work to make sure each room is going okay. It takes more overhead and is less bottom-up than the 2D spaces. But also, the level of commitment I think on average has forced conversations to get started and for people to commit to them? So it might actually be the best?
I think the 2d-space-video-chat thing is kinda love/hate, and one solution is just:
Start the event in Zoom, do the main talks in Zoom
At the end, people who prefer hanging out in Zoom stay in Zoom (maybe starting with randomized breakout rooms, which can gradually collapse back to the main Zoom Room when they get boring?)
People who prefer a 2d-space app go there and mill about (able to rejoin the main Zoom room if they want). This probably also helps solve some of the load on the 2d-space-app
The last app I tried out, which I was fairly optimistic about, was called Knit, which was not a 2d-space app, just a videocall running on Jitsi that included “people and form and join their own breakout rooms willy.” Unfortunately it also ran into some connection problems (I guess for similar reasons to why the 2d-space apps sometimes do), so it wasn’t actually an improvement over Zoom.