Network Check-Ins & TEST, TEST, TEST,
A first-ever Check-In meeting for the network developing around The (Virtual) Session Design Lab. An intended side effect of the Lab is for participants to start to rely on each other for inputs and feedback on their sessions, which is the perfect starting point for network-building. These check-ins will happen quarterly and compliment an email list and a newly established slack channel. This Check-In focused on how participants have applied what they learned since attending the Lab. The next (Virtual) Session Design Lab will take place July 7th & 8th.
We had our first Data Literacy Consortium Check-In meeting since lockdown and focused on the influence of COVID-19 on Data Literacy Practices. There’s been an enormous opportunity to break down the complexity of the data needed to understand the pandemic. Moving to online engagement has meant greater reach for data literacy efforts. Blog post forthcoming.
Solferino Digital, our team embedded in IFRC’s Solferino Academy, has a motto: TEST, TEST, TEST! This week we extensively tested the registration system for a Zoom meeting. The goal is to be able to get people to register for two meetings so that we can pre-assign breakout groups by language and facilitator. Things we’ve learned:
- It’s not easy to get a useable spreadsheet for pre-assigning breakout rooms from registrations. To get a .csv of registrants, you have to generate a report of those that have registered. That CSV needs some rejigging to make it ‘pre-assigned breakouts’ upload ready, thankfully Laurent Fernandez has built a handy script that does it automatically.
- Co-Hosts can move between breakout rooms! Only seems to be enabled after they’ve been assigned a breakout room by the host.
- You can provide names to the breakout rooms.
- You can force participants into rooms (rather than waiting for them to hit the ‘join room’ button). Hopping This will be helpful for when we have people with low-bandwidth.
- There’s still no way to allow participants to choose which breakout room they want to go.
- You have to load your ‘pre-assigned rooms .csv file BEFORE the meeting starts