The Hourlings writing group meets every Sunday without fail, and no pandemic is going to stop our meeting. Of course, certain realities obviously have to be taken into account…like the safety of our members. The last three meetings, including today’s meeting, shown above, have been conducted using the professional version of Zoom.
In this meeting, we had fourteen attendees for roughly three hours. Yes, I know it says 15, but Marty’s on twice, by phone and laptop, due to some technical difficulties on his end. Overall, it was easily accessible to everyone, and by a special link that had the meeting information baked into it. As a bonus, one of our attendees was Jeff Patterson, who moved away a couple years ago and now lives in the Atlanta region.
Some of the nice features of Zoom:
- A stackable view of the videos for all attendees.
- An integrated chat capability for sharing comments, links, etc.
- Screen Sharing (which we used a couple of times).
- Meeting recordings—to be kept around for about a week in case someone wants to revisit a key part of the meeting.
- Flexible Audio and Video Controls, i.e. – you can mute your audio and turn off your video whenever you want.
- Custom Backgrounds: In case you don’t want to show your house, or if you just want to have fun, you can have a custom background behind you. In my case, I chose to look like I was sitting in a fantasy bar.
All in all, it’s a pretty effective way to run a meeting.
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