Online alternatives to community get togethers
March 14, 2020 9:02 PM   Subscribe

There's a group in my community that meets once a month at a cafe for a casual coffee catch up for people who are usually isolated due to a specific illness. There's no presentation or official business, but rather people chat to their neighbours at the table, sometimes people move around to chat to other people and sometimes there's a period of whole group chat. It's been going for years and is scheduled for next weekend but for coronavirus social distancing reasons that's not possible. What technical solutions exist?

The group is about 20 people aged from 40 - 70 without a lot of technical skills. Almost all of them have smart phones and email addresses, which is how the regular meetups are organised.

The solution would ideally be really easy for these folks to access on their phone, tablet or laptop. It would allow them to catch up during a specific period of about 2 hours, have a chat, share photos of their cat, check in on each other, etc. It might have video capacity (although not sure how would that work with 20 people?), would have text chatting capability, might have places for people to break out into smaller chats (though that may be too confusing). I'll be setting up, creating user documentation for and facilitating the solution so not as worried about difficulty in initially setting this up on the admin side. There is no funding available for this, although if something was fairly cheap I might be able to pay for it this one time.

I don't think I want to set up an ongoing space at this time as the group is not yet set up for long-term moderation of that kind of thing. Maybe it will naturally evolve in future, but not right now.

I think it's really important that these people not feel even more isolated than normal and maintain their social connections during this time so I want to make this as easy and satisfying as possible for them. Advice on non-technical things that would help make this a success also welcome.
posted by mosessis to Technology (8 answers total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Discord can do all of that
  • desktop and mobile
  • add up to 250,000 people to a server
  • servers can have multiple chat channels
  • a user can be participate in multiple chat channels concurrently (super easy to have a general chat, pet pics chat, etc. and keep an eye on the ones you want)
  • each chat room can also have voice or video chat (up to 50 people temporarily for COVID 19)
  • free
Downside: It's not the easiest to learn
posted by meemzi at 9:29 PM on March 14, 2020


Best answer: Zoom can do this with video. Zoom is user friendly for fairly tech illiterate people.
posted by crunchy potato at 10:03 PM on March 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Zoom is definitely easy for non-technical people to use. (I have successfully used Zoom with people who have dementia).
posted by embrangled at 10:07 PM on March 14, 2020


Best answer: I think Zoom is free at low use levels.
posted by NotLost at 10:31 PM on March 14, 2020


One of my social networks just adopted Slack for this. It seems to be working ok and is quite easy to understand as it's designed for corporate use. Slack is free for unlimited users BUT history is limited to the last 50k messages unless you pay for access. (We don't care about history, we care about live engagement.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:18 AM on March 15, 2020


Best answer: Set up five four-person conference calls. Have the most technically comfortable people handle the setup. Bonus: interaction time beforehand working out the technical details.

Conversation is awesome.

Maybe designate one person per call as the facilitator, just to make sure people get heard, etc.
posted by amtho at 10:43 AM on March 15, 2020


Best answer: Once you solve the technical part, you might want to experiment with a somewhat more formal structure because of the limitations of online socializing. I've been in groups before that give everyone two minutes (timed!) to talk at the beginning, which allows everyone to have a chance to say something and gives others things to react to.
posted by metasarah at 8:42 AM on March 16, 2020


Response by poster: Thanks to everyone for their help. We ended up using Zoom and it really was easy for non-technical people. There were a couple of people who didn't join the first call because they thought it would be too hard, but they joined the second call because they had heard from others how easy it was! Great success.

Even better, there are a number of people in this group who are effectively homebound and were able to join in the group meetings for the first time in years. The organisers now want to do a regular zoom call even when stay-at-home ends because it's able to reach so many people.

I like amtho's suggestion of having smaller conference calls. We've offered the option for very tech-averse people to pair them up with someone else for a one-to-one regular phone call, but so far no one's taken us up on it. Everyone really likes being able to see each other.

I also really like metasarah's suggestion for more structure. One of the organisers has stepped up each month to facilitate the call, and there's a list of brainstormed questions they can use to help prompt conversation. We've also thought about breaking up into smaller groups (using the Breakout Rooms feature) but so far conversation has flowed really well with up to about 10 people. Sometimes you get one person dominating for awhile, but generally people seem aware of the group dynamics and will ask questions to others that haven't spoken as much.

It's been a great experience so far and I'm very happy with how it's turned out.
posted by mosessis at 10:27 PM on May 14, 2020


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