What would it take to make a remote event more social?

Thanks to COVID-19, large events as we know them are a luxury nobody can afford. The next best thing is a remote event. However I believe that in order to make a remote event nearly as fruitful as an in person gathering, we need much more than just a stable video feed.

I have experience in organising theatre plays, concerts, tech conferences and small meet-ups. What all of this things have in common, they attract people with similar interest to enjoy them together. Being at an event in person, gives you a possibility to meet like-minded people, establish connections, realise — there are people like you. That sad, the bigger an event, the less chances there are you will actually make friends, except if you are a skilled networker.

Good large conferences try to mitigate this shortcoming and provide occasions for networking. Such techniques are:

• Pre / post event parties, alcohol can be helpful to make friends
• Dedicated rooms for networking
• Badges and stickers, which expose your name and maybe a “talk to me about …” information
• Lunch breaks are often a good opportunity for networking, even while you are queuing for food
• Sitting arrangements, where people can sit in a small group, being able to exchange before and also during the talk. Yes it is impolite to whisper around during the talk, but be honest, how often did you do this yourself?

Those are details which define the experience of a live event.

Can we translate some of those experiences to a remote event?

Things like parties and lunch breaks (queueing for food) are out of the window. What we could do is focus more on the social media. Ask people to share their learning impressions and even introduce them selves. Be able to show this stream of emotions in one place. Maybe even create competitions. Make people post things and vote for the best one. Make it funny, make it educational, but most of all make it engaging. We want to emulate presence. We have to take our participants mind off their day to day problems and emerge them in our event. Even if they are physically just sitting at home. Remember an event take place multiple hours straight. Passively sitting and watching talks for couple of hours is not really engaging, we need to come up with something, which stimulates participants multiple times per hour.

“Dedicated rooms for networking” seems like a non brainer, but there is a difference between physical and virtual rooms. A physical room has a capacity. When we communicate in a physical room we build clusters of just a hand full of people and it is easy to move from one cluster to the next, when the conversations become dull. A virtual chat room is a mess, the more people are inside, the less meaningful the chat functionality becomes. Have you ever tried to follow the chats in YouTube or Twitch live streams? Did you ever tried to participate in such chat?

When it comes to a meaningful social communication, less is more. Chat rooms need to have capacity. Participants should be able to browse through chat rooms and try to join ones which have the most stimulating conversations, but there should be an admin, making sure it does not blow out of proportion.

Going a step further and looking at the point “Sitting arrangements” we could create adhoc “chat rooms” for every presentation and invite certain amount of attendees (e.g. 10) to those rooms randomly. Invite them 10 minutes before the talk starts, so they can have smalltalk. Maybe even provide some games / questions per channel for people to getting to know each other.

Hell, if there would be a video conference platform, which could create multiple small rooms which let participants watch the main stream (the speaker presenting) and talk to each other (also being able to mute each other). That might be better than sitting there in person in an oxygen deprived conference room.

Last idea which might make a remote event more social is something that sadly is not possible to do with any current video conference tool (AFAIK). It is to give the audience a “voice”. When people gather at a large event, they have a means to communicate back to the speaker. They laugh they clap and yes, some times they boo. The closest thing I saw in current tooling are the emoji buttons on live streaming tools like Facebook. But those are not same as real laughter, or claps. Real laughter and claps take time. They give a cue to the speaker to make a pause, maybe even emphasise on the point, which was important for the audience. When we hear someone else laugh we also laugh. One person clapping, motivate other people to clap. The video conference tools need to modulate such behaviour in order to be more social, engaging and give feedback to presenter. And as I sad before it needs to be done in a way which scales meaningful with the number of participants.

Those are my thoughts on “What would it take to make a remote event more social?” Thank you for reading and stay healthy.