Using Zoom: Some useful lessons learned

Last Friday evening, I took part in a short programme of Masonic talks that were delivered online via Zoom. We had over eighty attendees (the maximum we could accept was one hundred), and we learned some very useful lessons that will be applied when we run VCOW in July.

What happened on the night

• The presentations were scheduled to run from 8.15pm to 9.00pm, so we set up a virtual waiting room for attendees which opened at 7.45pm ... and we had people waiting to get into it when it did open!
• Well in advance we had nominated someone to chair the event. It was their responsibility to open the doors of the virtual waiting room at 8.00, and they muted everyone on entry to avoid a cacophony of talking and chatting.
• By 8.15pm we had 87 attendees, at which point the chair introduced the speakers, and then the first presentation (mine as it happens) took place.
• All the speakers used PowerPoint slides, which were set up before the sessions started so that when required, all they had to do was to select the ‘share screen’ option. (We had backed up the slides with the chair so that in event of a technical failure, they could still be shown.)
• Each of the presentations overran slightly, even though the presenters were all experienced speakers who had practised delivering their talks beforehand.
• We did not allow a Q&A session after each presentation because it would have been impossible to chair, although attendees could make comments or ask questions in real time using the 'comment' option on the bottom of the Zoom screen. We did ask that any questions be directed to the chair after the meeting, and these were then passed on to each speaker to answer.

Lessons learned

• You have to have someone in charge in order to ensure that things do not become chaotic.
• You have to be ready to start on time. To do otherwise is not only discourteous to the attendees, but also disruptive if you are putting on a number of presentations one after another.
• Having a waiting room enabled attendees to get ready to join the meeting prior to it starting, and allowed the chair to control the event.
• Attendees must be muted, otherwise the slightest unintentional noise could distract from what the speaker is saying and disrupt the enjoyment of the other attendees.
• A Q&A session would have been nice, but it would have been difficult to control. Perhaps we could have used the 'comment' option so that attendees could have posed questions or made comments during the presentations, and that these could have been dealt with by the chair after the speakers had each finished their presentations.

We will certainly be holding further such sessions of talks, and have plans to try a 'talking heads' session, where several people discuss a topic in front of a live but muted online audience.

I am now firmly convinced that this sort of session will have a prominent role to play at VCOW. I am not sure that you could use Zoom to stage a wargame involving such a large number of participants ... but I suspect that it might be possible if a number of online player 'cells' could be set up using Zoom's 'breakout room' facility. Whatever happens, I think that the use of electronic technology and its associated audio-visual programs/applications has a role to play in the future development of wargaming, not as a replacement for the more traditional face-to-face sessions and games, but as a very useful adjunct to them.