Forced by health authorities to avoid public meetings with more than 2 participants, AUSOM (Apple Users Society Of Melbourne) today conducted the first fully online monthly meeting via Zoom. History in the making! The group was formed in March of 1980. We purchased a single Pro licence and set up three Breakout rooms, which replicated the three most-commonly used physical rooms at our unavailable hired premises.
The meeting host then allocated all participants to a Breakout room as requested by each participant. When the interest group session finished 50 minutes later the participants either stayed in the breakout room to await the arrival of the next interest group co-ordinator who was a co-host or they left that breakout room & returned to the virtual front desk where whoever had been designated as the host could allocate them to a different Breakout room.
Playing with various settings as co-host it was discovered that while a co-host cannot move another participant to another Breakout room, they coiuld themselves move freely from one room to another. So in future we're going to look at making all participants co-hosts and let them decide which room (if any) they wanted to visit.
The general consensus was that as a trial run, it was mostly successful, just a few glitches/inconsistencies to be ironed out.
One really positive thing was the electronic presence of older members who for reasons of health, mobility or distance can no longer get to the actual meetings.
