Online meetups with Unhangout
I’ve organized tech meetups for a couple years now. I’ve watched people show up, make friends, get jobs and build a network and community for themselves. I’ve met people I would never have met otherwise, gotten opportunities I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done, and I love it.
It’s not all roses and rainbows. Plenty of people show up once or twice, and never again. Someone who came every month religiously moves two hours away. And then there are those who never showed up in the first place.
You can’t suit everybody, of course, but by holding my meetup in Mountain View at 7pm on a Tuesday, who am I preventing from coming? People work late, have night classes, kids, other obligations. Maybe they live two hours or two timezones away.
We’ve put everything else on the internet, why not meetups?
There’s a new open source project from MIT’s Media Lab called Unhangout that aims at this exact problem. It’s a mashup of Google On Air and Google Hangout: as the host, I use On Air to talk to everyone and create virtual tables with Hangouts so people can split up and work together.
It seemed perfect, so I ran a test to try it out.
Getting up and going
Creating events is currently invitation-only. You’ll need to sign in with a Google account, and then request access to create events from the home page. The developers were friendly and responsive.
Setting up the event in Unhangout was easy — you fill out information about the event (including a friendly URL to send people) and save it. By default, events are private and do not appear on the main page.
Running the event
I used my personal Gmail account for my Unhangout account, but I wanted to broadcast the event from our meetup group’s official YouTube account. This works, but it was fiddly. I had to sign in and out of a couple accounts to get the right ones to work with Google’s multiple sign-in feature.
To invite people, you send them the URL for the event, and anybody who knows that can join (more on that later). Simple and easy.
The first big annoyance we ran into was the 30 second delay in the broadcast stream, which made interacting with the group impossible to do real-time. If we’d had a speaker or a longer introduction it would’ve been fine, but for this smaller social meetup it was deadly. Next time, I’d take advantage of another feature and play a canned YouTube welcome video instead. Using the text chat was better.
Once I finished with introductions, I created breakout rooms so people could work on the workshop materials together. This is awesome and the single best thing about Unhangout. As the moderator, I can create any number of “rooms” and give them each a topic and folk can hop in and out of them as they like. It’s all powered with Hangouts, so it was familiar to most folk and worked great.
(This might seem obvious but I should mention you can’t broadcast On Air and be in a Google Hangout at the same time. I had to stop broadcasting when I wanted to jump into hangouts to help.)
Lessons learned
Afterwards, I sent out a survey to participants and unsurprisingly, people loved online meetups. Really, really loved it. Most rated it “excellent” or “very good”. In the comments, several parents said they could only attend online meetups and several others said they were outside the Bay Area and too far away for in-person events. A lot of people asked “when can we do this again?” and that made me very happy.
The Unhangout software was also rated highly. People found it easy to use and navigate, and they really liked the ability to join a room of their choice and self-select what level to work at.
On the “things to improve” side, I had a lack of volunteer helpers for this initial event so I was forced to bounce from room to room. People found this frustrating. I suspect it’s because online workshops feel like cooperative solitaire: everyone works at their own pace with Hangouts open in the background and asks questions as they go. There’s also no good mechanism to message me and ask for help if I’m not in the room. Next time, I’d aim for one volunteer per virtual room.
The unfortunate fatal flaw
I loved this setup. LOVED it. We have PyLadies chapters all over the world, and the idea of global meetups is amazing. Unfortunately, there’s a fatal flaw which makes Unhangout unusable for large events: anyone with the URL can join the meeting, and once they’re in, I can’t kick them out.
Every organizer has stories about That Person they had to ask to leave. It’s worse for my group because we’re a women’s meetup and sadly there are folk who find women chatting about tech to be extremely threatening. It just takes one jerkass posting our meetup on certain forums and we’re flooded with garbage-vomiting trolls. If I can’t enforce our code of conduct, I can’t run an event in good conscience.
Before running an event with any amount of publicity, I’d need the ability to specify which gmail addresses can join and be able to kick miscreants out (and in a perfect world permaban them so they can’t join future events). Also, I’d like private messaging so I can address concerns discretely.
A great beginning
Kudos to the developers of Unhangout for a great first release. This is a fantastic start and I’m very excited to see where this trend goes. Everybody deserves to find their tribe and support group, no matter how far you live from Silicon Valley.
