Zoom Mobility

As an introvert and person with options (and free will :)) I need to be able to choose which zoom break-out room I will join so that I can self-organise. I do not always want to be assigned to a break-out room.

As a facilitator and an educator/trainer I need to have space for people in my meetings and training sessions to organise themselves into break-out rooms.

Randomly assigning people to breakout rooms was cool, but it’s like speed dating or musical chairs—it’s fun for some and agony for others.

Also in a classroom, or in a working meeting, we often want to ask people to form their own small groups (break-outs) to talk about their interests (in some cases people call this "birds-of-a-feather").

I’d like a feature that allows all meeting participants to see the list of break-out rooms that are "open". Then the participants can choose their own room to join.

How I Want It

• I would like the host to have an option to assign names to each break-out room that will be displayed for participants to choose from (default could be boring names like "Room 1", "Room 2", etc.)

  • This is so that participants can chat each other and say 'let’s join "Room 2"', or the host may want to give some indication of what will happen in each room (by name) so that participants can decide which room to join.

  • I would like for the host to able to set a topic for a room (or leave it blank). I’d want a longer entry field. Something like 140-270 characters (twitter size) should be good. This is so that participants would see the topic when choosing the room.

    • Participants in the room should be able to change the topic. (I want to allow participants to decide their own topic to set.) This is so that participants can set their own agendas and invite others to join them (by letting others see what they’ve set).

      Some sample topics might be:

      • "Hardware", "Software", "Architecture", or

      • "A topic about including all voices in the conversation" and "A topic about equity", or

      • "The people in this breakout invite you to join us to discuss X"

      • Things like that.

      (Naturally I think you’d want to allow the host to enable or disable the ability for pax to change their topic.)

• Participants should ideally be able to see who is already in a room to help them choose rooms.

• Once participants are in a room they should still be able to see the other rooms' information so they can choose to move rooms.

Some More Options (while we're asking)

• I want to be able to (optionally) limit the size of breakouts to a max size so that you can show full break outs when max is reached (the host might ask people to form groups of 4 ...  so would set room to max 4). Of course unlimited should be an option.

• I also want a killer (optional) feature. I want each participant to have the ability to listen "at the door" of a room without joining (to see if they want to join)

  • for security people in the room should be able to enable or disable this

  • for security there should probably be a message on screen to people in the room when someone is listening at the door

WHY?

There are so many kinda of meetings and classes where people need to mingle and form their own groups (this is also great for networking events).

In a large real room we often say put your chairs in an ad-hoc circle. Or find a table to join. Or we even go to physical breakout rooms and meet us back in an hour. People need to choose their groups, set their topics, and do their work. Usually people can move around when they want. We never shove people into a room and lock them there. (Well, unless it's political or crime and punishment related ...). We usually expect  the freedom tom move on our own. Imagine the free flow of a cocktail party mingle or a bar camp.

This is vital to a Open Space Techology meeting.

This feature—moblitity and self-organsiation—is a major missing component from remote meet-ups—including Zoom.

Zoom gets so many things right in order to create smooth, easy, remote meetups. Break-out rooms were an invaluable start.

This might be the one thing Zoom is still missing that I’d switch to another provider for. 

I’ve also talked to school teachers who would really like this feature for distance learning, too.