On Thursday, July 9, 2020 at 5:16:07 PM UTC-7, trl wrote:
One of the notable drawbacks I keenly felt in today's "Virtual meeting at
meet.jit.si/berkeleylug from 11 am on" was the lack of the ability to have
sub-conversations during the meetup.Sub-conversations, as in being able to talk with others on-the-side as one can during live meetups when attendants are not necessarily beholden to directly participate under the topic(s) pursued by the elected/unelected meetup moderator during the times of active discussion.
Probably that's due to the very nature of Jitsi as well as Zoom, where typically only one or two persons at a time can "lead" or keep the focus upon the active discussion topic at hand.
Sure, one can use the Raise the Hand Jitsi feature to speak up, but speaking for myself, am unlikely to do so to interrupt what I perceived to be irrelevant discussion on non-Linux-related....
- legal issues surrounding why a currently unemployed school teacher got themself fired for their behavior
- monologue on the background history of Hong Kong and colonial/post-colonial China
- someone's kid settling in Stockholm and others' visits to the same
Can any of you think of other stategies to circumvent this drawback?
Three strategies that immediately come to mind are ....
1. The Jitsi forum organizer taking a more active role in suggesting that distracting, irrelevant discussions such as the above be instead discussed offline.
2. Attending the online meetup, then leaving when the discussion becomes effectively sidetracked, and then re-attending much later on when the "sidetrackers"
have said most of what they're going to say.
3. Simply not participating at all in that particular online meetup, i.e., in the next BerkeleyLUG virtual meeting in <2wks time.
-Aaron