How We Ran our First Online Broke Bibliophiles Bangalore Event -

1: Identify number of possible participants

This is important because it lets you make decisions about the total event’s duration and also, Step 3 depends on this because if you’re using a free service, each of them have a different limit. We have an offline limit of 20. So I decided to keep it at 10-12 this time. We had a max of 12 people at any given period this time.

2: Decide what you want to do in the event:

We decided to follow the same model as we do in our offline meetups - go around the group and talk about the books we’ve read. The order was based on the order in which people joined the meetup.

3: Identify the video conferencing service you want to use

Options -

  • Google Meet (Easy to Use, No Recording option, Mutable by all )
  • Zoom (Commercial - Has a free plan, Has Recording Option, Mutable by mod)
  • Bluejeans (Commercial - 14 day trial period, Has Recording feature, Mutable by mod)
  • Skype For Business (Commercial)
  • Jitsi (Open source - Limited features)
  • Jamm (Limited features - Tried it - Simple, but not good enough yet)

I’ve used BlueJeans a lot and I know all about it, so I wanted to experiment with Zoom , and we went with that and I loved it tbh..Will get a Bluejeans account for the one in April, but for the next one in March, we’re going to go with Zoom again.

4 : Duration of event -

It was intended that it would be for 40 minutes i.e. the duration of a free Zoom call. But Zoom didn’t kick us out, so we just kept going for 2 hours. It’s possible that my account was premium because I was on a trial period and that has no limit. But this is yet to be tested.

5 : Other features -

  • Mute on entry
  • Mute in the middle of the meeting in case there are external voices etc.

6 : How to enforce discipline :

  • One person talk at a time
  • Preferably video on for everyone so you can raise your hand in case you want to interrupt
  • If your video is off, please comment on chat that you want to talk.
  • Precheck your internet connection to minimize interruptions

This post will be updated with more details.