Welcome! Thank you for your interesting in being a host for our Virtual Coffee zoom sessions. Like most roles here, while the concept is straightforward, there can be a lot of nuance, so we've tried as best as we can to provide clear cut instructions where we're able.
The host role in VC is responsible for:
- Creating the breakout rooms we use in the virtual coffee sessions
- Assigning members to those breakout rooms, including volunteer room leaders and note-takers
- Managing incoming members throughout the zoom session
- Notifying rooms that they're about to be closed, closing the breakout rooms, and ending the zoom session
A Virtual Coffee Zoom session can largely be split into Three (3) Phases:
- Pre Coffee Chat (Before the MC starts official introduction of the session)
- Breakout room time (the majority of the zoom time, everyone should be in a breakout room)
- Wrap up and announcements (discussions are done, folks are back in the main zoom session)
- Ask the MC (or a maintainer present) to give you host permissions if you don't have it already.
- Create co-hosts for those doing room leadership/conversation facilitation by clicking on their image card in Zoom and assign co-host
- We recommended starting host and room prep as soon as you have host authority
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Click the breakout room icon,
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Select the number of rooms according to the number of potential rooms. You will be able to add rooms later if necessary.
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Choose assign manually (This is really important. It allows you to add people after they join.)
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Check Slack for any messages about how many rooms we need. Please do coordinate with the volunteers in the slack channel as sometimes plans need to be adjusted based on number of participants
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We try to keep less than 10 persons per room. Having enough room leaders should be prioritized over having enough notetakers. It is typically advised to pull a notetaker to a roomleader position (with their permission) if the alternative would be rooms with more than 10 people. But it's important that everyone who is placed as a room leader volunteered to do so, either by indication in the official volunteer request earlier in the week or on the day of the meeting.
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Pair each co-host with their notetaker.
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Note: Sometimes, if the room leader is a VC Maintainer/zoom account owner, you may not see them on the list of attendees to be assigned. This is fine. So long as they're in the meeting, they can join their breakout room themselves.
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Change the name of the breakout room to the co-host/notetaker pair
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Assign members into rooms as they come in
- Do your best to create breakout rooms that include a variety of participant types. For example, if you know there are members who will keep the conversation going, assign them to different rooms. If there are new folks, try not to put them all in the same room. If there's a newer room leader, try to add someone to their room that could support them if they need it. The goal is to have well-balanced rooms when possible. It won't ever be perfect for every room, but the goal is to try to balance participant types.
- As soon as the MC is done with the intro and asks if rooms are ready, open up all rooms.
- Note: The host has to assign themselves to a room.
- If a person joins late, a notification shows up in Breakout Rooms. Assign new attendees to a room (try to keep all about the same size).
- When there's about 7 minutes left, send a message to all rooms that we'll be rejoining the group in about two minutes.
- At ten minutes to the hour, use the broadcast button in the Participants tab to let everyone know the rooms will be closing in 5 minutes.
- At Five minutes to the hour, hit the close rooms button.
- Try as best as you can not to delay closing the rooms, as it burdens the MC to squeeze all the final annoucements in on time.
- As the host, the zoom does not officially end until you close it. You can close as soon as the MC completes their annoucements and we do our usual group goodbye and wave :)