From social networking over having a Fish Bowl conversation to giving a presentation to a bigger audience: thing.online makes shaping conversational settings as natural as in real life.
Can I quickly listen into a small work group as a facilitator? Sure. Can I whisper to my neighbor while someone is giving a speech? If she's ok with it...
"Find a partner and share your perspective about..."
It's easy for facilitators to ask participants to form conversations, it's easy for participants to autonomously follow this request, thanks to spatial video chat.
Moving in space let's participants form and dissolve ad-hoc conversations, to whisper to someone else while listening to a speaker.
MeetingSpaces provide means for most scenarios for smaller groups. For bigger gatherings we can design a whole event venue, so participants can easily move between MeetingSpaces.
Use space portals to invite participants to spatially move between the connected spaces. Maybe we saw too many of these films... 🚀
We provide the full spectrum of emojis, from a bright smile to a strong anger, because we know that real teams go through groan phases - in real life and virtually.
Our hand signs are perfect to ask the group for commitment, to have voting and consent decision rounds.
More reactions welcome!🤙
Text chat is a must-have feature in every collaboration app. And hence thing.online also has text chat as an additional communication channel beyond video and audio.
More to say here? Well, we have ideas to couple the chat with some of our upcoming activities. What if the participants could build a word cloud directly from the chat, vote using the chat window or similar things? Let us know if you have such needs.
Get together with your team and collaborate on whiteboards, documents and planning boards. Continue using the tools you already love, focus on the task at hand - all within a single browser tab. Add quizzes, polls and other activities to engage with the team.
Let's imagine the following meeting scenario: The facilitator asks us to from groups around tables. Let's focus on the task at hand and work on the outcome for the current step, without being disturbed by other working groups.
Another scenario: As someone in the audience we want to focus listening the trainer's remarks, looking at the wall and the slides presented.
The focus view can be both - your virtual version of the group table or the wall to look at.
How can you make sure to get heard by a bigger group? Place the speaker panel in the conversation space and step up to talk to the whole group. No need to ask everyone to mute like you may have done it so far.
How can you speak to multiple working groups at once and give them additional instructions without dissolving the groups? Step up to the speaker panel - done. No need to broadcast text messages anymore.
While tempted to do so, we don't reinvent the wheel when it comes to collaborating on documents, working on whiteboards or doing polls and quizzes during a meeting.
However, we make sure that all the best-of-breed collaboration tools - Miro, Mural, Conceptboard, Google Docs, Mentimeter, slid.do and more - work nicely in thing.online.
Stop sending links around in the chat, start using our integrations for a smooth collaboration experience without juggling between browser tabs.
"Let me show you something."
When collaborating online, it's essential to have ordinary screen-sharing available. However, as we value the participant's autonomy, it's their choice if they want to look at what you share with them.
Sometimes it's the small variations that can make a huge difference 🙂.
There seems to be some magic around the recipe for successful meetings.
While meetings benefit from the autonomy of participants, they also benefit from the right kind of structure - be it giving context to participants, navigating through time or using the space to invite for structured conversations.
There seems to be some magic around the recipe for successful meetings. There are meetings that are just too strict: Only one speaks, sharing information that nobody else knows what the context is, the meeting ends without any tangible outcome.
The opposite are meetings out of the category "Let's talk about it". Everybody talks with everybody else about everything. Also not the recipe for getting valuable outcomes.
While meetings benefit from the autonomy of participants, they also benefit from the right kind of structure - be it giving context to participants, navigating through time or using the space to invite for structured conversations.
To reach clarity about what should happen in a meeting, an agenda with the items listed should be common practice.
thing Flow starts there - and it is so much more.
Define timeboxes for the agenda items, check during the meeting if the meeting can end in time, make sure that the right material and activities are available at the right point in time.
thing Flow does what the technical co-host did when we started to do workshops online with tools not fit for the job: It's your virtual facilitation assistant.
The timebox - one of the easiest and one of the most effective enabling constraints when you want to achieve results without endless discussions.
Our flexible timer helps individuals and teams to work on something and keep the timebox in sight.
Regarding autonomy, it's the decision of the participants to finish the sentence and dissolve the conversation when the time is over.
"Let me share the link in the chat..." and the link gets lost with all the other chit-chat that happens there.
Not with our shortcut activity - a place where all the links needed for the current flow step are easily accessible for everyone.
In combination with link portals on dedicated places in the MeetingSpace you can design game-like activities like treasure hunts (or more serious activities 😉) for your teams.
Every space makes invitations to foster (or prevent) certain behaviors.
Make MeetingSpaces your own and guide conversations with a growing set of our pre-defined widgets or with your own branded custom widgets.
Use the huge MeetingSpaces to shift between phases with the whole group and focused working groups.
Facilitate real constellation scenarios using the spatial possibilities of our MeetingSpaces.
Most tools either leave participants alone how to do certain things or they force them to something without giving them a choice. Both extremes are not contributing to let participants connect to the meeting.
With our facilitators guides you can do what's appropriate in context. Help first time participants to have a look at the agenda, keep it their choice for experienced participants.
Coming back to the magic of successful meetings: It's the balance between autonomy and structure.
Lean to someone else to whisper while a talk is going on. Come closer to a table conversation to only talk to the participants on the table. Enter the speaker panel to become a speaker, heard by all others.
Whenever you have the chance to facilitate and host together, we'd like to encourage you to do it. However, it's not always possible to have a technical co-host. thing.online is on your side, being the technical co-host.
Collaboration starts when designing a workshop. Come together as facilitators and use the MeetingSpace to co-create the agenda, put the material together and setup the space.
Most tools struggle to support both - a presentation with one or a few speakers and small group work or social networking. thing.online supports both. No need to switch between tools.
Good workshops emerge out of the right balance between autonomy of participants and structure. thing.online gives you the choice to find the balance that's needed for your workshop.
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