food hub & Community workspace in New Denver, BC, Canada

Hosting a “visiting” expert

Board room set-up for hybrid meetings with projector and MeetingOwl.

Fireweed Hub’s multimedia meeting set-up is proving to be flexible, effective, approachable and engaging. We are grateful to have a set of really top-notch tech resources* and a flexible space, all of which work together to create a terrific hybrid meeting experience. It is nothing like the COVID-era Zoom meetings most of us suffered through with their limitations, distractions and technical glitches.

Recently Fireweed Hub played host to particular style of hybrid meeting whereby a group of local citizens came together in our flex space to participate as a group in a meeting with a single “visiting” facilitator who was hundreds of miles away. It worked incredibly well. Everyone agreed it was a huge improvement over any remote meetings they had participated in previously. “So much better!!” they said. “If I meet with people I want to meet with people.” Or “I just wouldn’t have done this if I’d had to dial in from home. This was great.”

So how did it work? In the flex space at Fireweed we pushed our tables together into a board-room-like configuration and distributed notepads, pens, water jugs and name tags. With hot coffee and tea brewed and a catered lunch laid out, we hooked a laptop up to the room’s projector and MeetingOwl. Then we joined the meeting over our fantastic AirOptic internet.

The host popped up on the projector screen, larger than life. There was no gallery of tiny faces, chat-boxes, pop-up notifications or other distractions: just her cheerful face. The local participants were together in real life, so it felt more like a gathering than an online experience. There was a sense of community and human-ness.

At the facilitator’s end, she experienced the wonder of our MeetingOwl. This piece of equipment is a very clever 360-degree webcam. When plugged into a laptop that is part of a video-conference, it sends out a live panoramic view of the entire room, and also an automatically-generated zoomed-in vignette of whomever in the room is currently speaking. She was able to recognize and address particular individuals easily, inviting them to contribute, or ask a question and see a show of hands. The MeetingOwl also handled the audio of normal conversational tone very well, with its responsive omnidirectional microphone.

In conjunction with the projector the experience at both ends was flawless and intuitive. We were particularly impressed with how it appealed to people who aren’t normally fans of information technology, or those who have vision or hearing difficulties that sometimes present challenges.

We think there are probably lots of local groups who could use this set-up to occasionally tap into the expertise of someone who can’t necessarily travel to New Denver to meet with them in-person.

* We appreciate the co-operation of the New Denver and Area Housing Society (NDAHS) in the form of a partnership agreement between our societies. The MeetingOwl and digital projector installed at Fireweed Hub belong to the NDAHS, and we are grateful to be able to make them available to community groups for use at our site.

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