I’ve got some very good questions via email. I’m replying here to make it visible to readers. Q: “Hosts, virtual hosts… Excelent text but it is not clear to me how many people and computers are really needed to convert a meeting into a functional blended meeting. What are the practical experiences? Can those people follow the meeting or they are devoted to communications tasks and start functioning as a technical stuff?”
A: How many people to take virtual host role in blended meetings? It really depends on how large is the group that’s convening. In my experience, general principle would be Larger the group, more roles and structure is needed to make the meeting functional. Ideally, in large blended meetings there will be several participants willing to take the role of virtual host using their own laptops and/or equipment provided by organisers. They serve as a “link” between what’s going on in the room and distant participants and, ideally, they already have relationship established with distant participants they will support. For international meetings it could be, for example, one host per language, or one host per working group, etc.
Can those people handle distant participants and take part in a meeting? Ideally, they can — if they are skilled enough with the tools and equipment used. It is difficult for us to learn to ride a bike. At first it takes a lot of our attention, but over time we don’t even notice any more. In our movement we constantly work with paradoxes (“how to speed-up slowing-down” for example) and this is such situation. I belive in benefits of focusing and active listening, and I don’t think multitasking is really beneficial. And yes, we are all constantly multitasking, particularly when we use our gadgets. As facilitator, I’m generally reluctant to assign attention demanding tasks to meeting participants because that affects their ability for active participation. And that’s particularly the case with online participation because our screens offer constant stream of distractions. On the the other hand, our meetings are done in way that we all share burden of meeting roles in order to support each other and also to practice and learn. So it can be difficult for people to start taking that role, but hopefully they will get better over time.
The aim of this approach for collaborative groups is to make them “blended” during real life meetings, whith people present face-to-face and distant participants that feel actively involved, not excluded. That’s another reason why this role is better done by peers, familiar with all the people and their joint work, and not by one or more uninterested technicians. Very often, because they are uninterested, technicians do rather clumsy work.
