Hi All, Someone asked me for advice about hosting an online open space with 1500 people who work on child welfare. They want to get the "whole system in the room", including government, professionals, families, etc.
I can see that there are at least two separate parts to this challenge: tech/software and facilitation. *1. Tech/Software:* What technology decisions would you make to accommodate 1500, since the capacity of Zoom meetings is 1000? I wrote up my thoughts on this part at the bottom of this email. *2. Facilitation:* This is the main question that I have for colleagues on OSLIST. What special design considerations would you have during an open space (online or not) with more than 1500 people? Here are some questions that come to mind: - How many sessions do you think people will propose if this is a 1-day, 6 hour event with 3-4 rounds of discussion sessions? I searched OSLIST and found this from Harrison in 2016: "Rule of thumb... for all these years.... 5 break our rooms/spaces per 100 participants. For smaller groups (+- 50) a large room with nooks usually works better. I’ve had groups of 25 with 4-5 groups working at the same time." So that would mean 50 spaces, therefore up to 150 sessions, but I would expect that the rule of thumb acts more as a maximum as groups get larger, because there's probably a lot of duplicate topics as groups get larger. - If there are 150 sessions proposed, do you give everyone a chance to speak their session to the large group or just view the list of sessions? If everyone had just 15 seconds then that would be 38 minutes of just listening to session topics. Ahh!! - How do you make it easy for participants to merge their sessions together? I guess they could ask to move to a Zoom breakout room and we could pair them off for a moment, or they could connect with each other in chat -- that seems practical. My thoughts on tech options are below. Any other thoughts that you have? Thank you! *Lucas Cioffi* QiqoChat | Lead Software Engineer lu...@qiqochat.com +1.917.528.1831 Live Online Events | Engaging Communities | Real Collaboration Drop in for open office hours! <https://learn.qiqochat.com/events> Options for handling more than 1000 people in Zoom + Qiqo Qiqo has a max capacity of 2500, and Zoom has a max capacity of 1000 *interactive* participants in a single meeting. There are several solid options for increasing the event size above 1000 people. *Option 1:* We can connect two 1000-person Zoom meetings together, where the second room is an overflow room. The people in the overflow room can hear what is going on in the first room and can speak & use the chat with each other but they cannot speak & use the chat in the first room. (The technical way this happens is that a second facilitator joins the overflow room from their Zoom app, then they join the first Zoom meeting through their Web browser Chrome/Firefox/Safari/etc and then they screenshare that into the overflow Zoom meeting). The facilitator in the first room can be the voice for people in the overflow room and can speak into the first room what is happening in the chat of the overflow room (if they have the overflow meeting open in their browser. You can have up to 1000 other people with this option. We will add to our staff a skilled moderator for the overflow room so that people there feel engaged and not that they are passively watching and left out. You can also add the livestream in option 2 (below) to this option so people can choose from the main Zoom, overflow Zoom, and the livestream. *Option 2:* We can livestream from the 1000-person Zoom meeting into QiqoChat so that anyone who joins after the meeting reaches capacity will be able to see the livestream from the same page where they are. We have several options where everyone can be in the same chat (outside of Zoom) or we can use the regular chat inside of Zoom for the main room and have an overflow chat for everyone watching the livestream. You can have up to 1500 other people with this option. *Option 3:* Today we requested that Zoom increases the max capacity of their meetings to 2000 people. They have never done that for any customer as far as we know, however we have several months and they may be able to make this happen. *Option 4:* We could use a Zoom webinar (and make each speaker a panelist for a minute) instead of a Zoom meeting but then people wouldn't see everyone in the room.
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