Make Your Meetup Virtual
Nino Handler, organizer of GDG Nuremberg, shared his takeaways from organizing and participating in virtual events during the last weeks. I highly recommend you to read his article for a “lessons learned” approach to this topic.
My article explains the why and how. It’s no in-depth technical article, but maybe it helps someone to save a few minutes when trying to decide which setup to choose.
Create A Virtual Meetup
Most physical meetups I went to could be divided into two parts:
Talks and socializing. Let’s try and bring those building blocks to virtual meetups.
There were two possible routes that came to our mind when we thought about how to make this possible for GDG Nuremberg. The first route is a moderated video conference call with speakers, organizers and participants in the same room. The second route, which we decided to go, is to divide the event into a conference call with speakers and moderators and a livestream and chat for the participants.
Route A: Video Conference Calls
This is probably the route with the lowest technical overhead. There’s software like Jitsi, Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams. All of them are great for hosting video conferences. With all of them you can share screens (for slides e.g.) and have a designated moderator control what’s focused and audible or visible. Some allow you to livestream your conference to live streaming platforms like YouTube Live or Twitch. Live streaming enables you to reach a much bigger audience because there’s no need for viewers to join a conference call that has limitations on how many participants can take part.
As the video conferencing space is moving fast at the moment there’s nearly no value in comparing features in an article. They come and go while I’m writing this text. But I’ll share the features we compared at the time we had to decide which route to take:
- meet.jit.si
✔ free
✔ no sign up necessary
✔ screen sharing available
✔ recording available
✔ open source (you can even host your own Jitsi server)️
❌ max 75 conference participants
❌ experimental live streams
❌ some moderation features (e.g. muting) - Google Meet
✔ max 250 conference participants
✔ screen sharing available
✔ record the conference
❌ not free (you need a G Suite account to host a conference)
❌ live streaming limited to participants from same domain
❌ some moderation features - Zoom
✔ screen sharing available
✔ record the conference
✔ great moderation features
✔ great collaboration features (whiteboards, break-out-rooms, …)
❌ max 100 conference participants
❌ freemium
❌ live streaming is a paid feature
Bold text in the comparison above highlights those features that limit the number of participants. To make it short: we decided against the video conferencing route. Even if it was utopian to think we would reach the maximum number of participants, we wanted no artificial limitations or barriers for viewers to join and participate.
If live streaming is no top priority for you: It’s always possible to record your conference and upload it somewhere. But this will limit the way your viewers can interact and socialize, which in our opinion is an essential part of our meetups.
Road B: Livestream Your Virtual Meetup
There’s an infinite number of ways to do this. All platforms for livestreams offer a RTMP server that waits for your video input. You’re totally free in how this video input is created and how it looks like. I am now going to explain with what we ended up and how we did it.
The Setup We Decided To Use
If you want to first have a look at what our stream looked like, then have a look at the recorded Twitch stream.
Our setup can be described as follows:
A moderator guides the participants through the program and introduces the speakers.
Speakers share their screen to show their slides and IDE (for live coding).
Participants are able to ask questions through a chat system or through a Q&A and poll service, sli.do, that we embed in the stream. The chat system is provided by Twitch.
There are a lot of tutorials out there that teach you how to livestream on YouTube Live or Twitch (or Mixer, …). All of those services offer you an authenticated endpoint on their RTMP server after you signed up and created your channel.
You’ll need broadcasting software to feed the RTMP server with data. There is a long list of tools you can choose from. As Mac users we quickly encountered compatibility problems and the list got shorter. We had absolutely no experience in video editing and encoding, so we decided for a solution that looked easy to setup and easy to use and is at least free to test.
Streamlabs OBS looked like a perfect match! You can use your Twitch account to login, the software then setups some widgets and the settings for your channel. You are able to compose background images, video sources, the chat widget and a multitude of other widgets and then save your composition as a scene. After you have built all scenes for the different speakers and stages of your schedule you can define transitions between those scenes. When you’re done, just hit the start button and you’re live! Sounds easy and indeed, we were pretty happy with our choice.
But before we play around with Streamlabs OBS: there’s still a problem to solve! How to get the video input from the speakers, the moderator and the shared screen? Mario Fahlandt helped us out and described how GDG Cloud Munich is solving this.
There’s a technology called Network Device Interface (NDI) that allows Skype to make the separated video and audio of all speakers and the shared screen locally available for other software. Like Streamlabs OBS. Just follow their tutorial for setting up Streamlabs and NDI and then activate NDI in Skype.
This is the moment. Technically you’re ready to stream. You now can start with Streamlabs OBS and go crazy with setting up scenes! This will take some time, depending on your needs, but you’ll end up with visuals that will make your community members feel at home when they join your channel again.
Was It Worth The Effort?
As a total newbie to video editing and live streaming I felt a bit lost a few times when I tried to set everything up. There are tutorials all around the internet, so everything seems to be solvable with some effort. During the event some things went wrong. Yes, even a “we are live in 3.. 2.. aaand… my system crashed” nightmare situation. Fortunately, we were back after a few seconds and a quick reboot.
But we did this for the viewers and judging from the feedback we got, the viewers enjoyed the format and we are on the right track. We had a lot more participants than during our regular, non-pandemic, local meetups and we even had interactions from the global audience that joined our event. This was very rewarding to us.
But there’s more good in creating Twitch and YouTube channels for your community. Obviously you’ll unlock a global audience for your events. But you’ll also enable people to take part that couldn’t make it previously because of physical, psychological or other barriers. Sure, we strive to keep those hurdles as low as possible during our physical meetups. But there will always be things like e.g. geographical distance or social anxiety. Not long ago I often ended up as a no-show exactly because of social anxiety. During a virtual meetup it’s not even required to activate your camera. You’ll take part in a community event, even if you decide against going “all in” at first. Virtual meetups are here to stay! It totally was worth the effort.
