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Video Conferencing

Zoom

Zoom is one of the most popular video conferencing tools due to ease of use, numerous features, and Freemium pricing model.

The free version offers 40 minutes of talk time for up to 100 participants

The Free version is NOT recommended for club meetings as it does not support dial-in access, as well as the time limit.

If your club needs a free software solution that supports dial-in try

FreeConferenceCall.com⁠

Jitsi Meet⁠

⁠

To remove the time limit you need a paid plan $15/month (or $150 for 12 months)

The next tier supports up to 500 participants (business accounts start at 300 participants)

Webinars with extra features are available for an extra fee (start at $40/month)

Visit

https://zoom.us⁠

for more details

Configuration for Clubs

If you're new to Zoom we recommend first trying out these settings in a smaller meeting - E-Board, social meeting, coffee morning, cocktail hour.

Registration

We recommend using Registration on Zoom - that you can enable from the web-interface for the meeting. Having everyone register with an email address, also enables you to setup Zoom Breakout rooms ahead of the meeting e.g. you could create rooms for non-members, voting members, new members or committees or other groups within your club.

Security

To avoid being hijacked (Zoom-bombed) during a meeting there are a few precautions you'll want to take to minimize that risk:

use a waiting room, that allows you to only admit registered Democrats to the meeting

configure only the Host to share their screen (you can easily make some of the participants co-hosts, if you want them to share their screens during the meeting)

Livestream the meeting to YouTube or Facebook (from Zoom) for non-members

Here are some useful guides on how to configure Zoom settings:

⁠

Zoom Settings For General Meetings⁠

- a list of meeting settings, with embedded comments

⁠

Harden Your Zoom Settings to Protect Your Privacy and Avoid Trolls⁠

- Electronic Frontier Foundation

⁠

Configuring a meeting to deter Zoom-bombing⁠

- Zoom

⁠

Virtual House Party Organizer Zoom Guide⁠

- California Democratic Party

Accessibility

It's a tenet of the California Democratic Party to make meetings at all levels of the Party open to all registered Democrats. In an online world this is equally important. Meetings should be accessible to members with a smartphone or laptop, but also to those using a regular phone. Likewise online voting systems should be chosen to meet the needs of all members.

Zoom supports streaming meetings to Facebook and YouTube, and both support closed captioning for accessibility. Zoom also supports other paid third party partners for captions, or you can delegate a participant to manually provide captions throughout the meeting.

Dial-in Access

Zoom supports dial-in access, and participants can

Mute/un-mute using *6

Raise their (virtual) hand using *9 (note: pressing *9 again does not lower the hand for a dial-in user, the host or co-host must do this for them)

Chat

Chat is great for sharing links to useful information, and for asking questions of a speaker, but there's an accessibility issue, it's not visible to everyone including those dialing in to your meeting from a regular phone.

For this reason it's advised to configure the Chat to only allow messaging from participants to the meeting host, and co-hosts. If the host (re-)posts messages to the chat these should also be read out, so that all the participants in the meeting are aware.

Zoom has a feature that let's you save all of the Chat to a text file, very useful if you want to save links and references that are shared in the Chat during the meeting. But beware it also saves all of the 'Private' messages between the Host and participants. If you are the host and need to message members privately, it's best to use another method, such as text messaging. This discovery was

posted on Twitter⁠

, and later

confirmed by Forbes with Zoom⁠

Time Keeping

Often the moderator of the meeting wants to limit the time participants get to speak. There are several ways to share a countdown clock on the screen for the speaker, and participants. You could hold your timer up towards your camera, or hold up a piece of paper that shows the remaining time. It can be seen by all the participants who have you on their screen, but that may, or may not, include the speaker!

You can also easily Share an iPhone or iPad screen on Zoom in a number of ways. Simplest is probably to plug a cable between the iPhone and your laptop, then when you choose to Share screen, a dialog appears and one of the options is the cabled iPhone. Alternatively if the devices are both on the same local network you can use Airplay. Another way is to join the Zoom meeting (under another login) from your iPhone (or Android) and then share that screen. Before sharing it’s worth turning on Do Not Disturb, in case you get notifications while sharing that you don’t want other folks on the call to see!

The host of the meeting can use colored backgrounds to notify speakers of time remaining - available to download

here⁠

. Alternatively, videos of a countdown clock can be used, and displayed by the host as their background - download

here⁠

. The host’s screen is more easily seen by all the participants, so the timekeeper for the meeting should be assigned as the Zoom host.

Voting

Zoom has a couple of features for quick/easy voting at meetings, but to use them with confidence the participants need to be divided ahead of the vote using breakout rooms to insure that only voting members are counted. There are more inclusive and robust

Online Voting⁠

solutions.

Zoom has a Raised Hand and Yes/No option that can be selected by Zoom Participants. If you have guests and non-voting members as participants in the Zoom meting you'll need to identify them to exclude them from the count. One way to do this is to move voting members into a Zoom breakout room, if participants have registered for the meeting you can create breakout rooms beforehand based on email address. Alternatively you may choose to only allow voting members to join the Zoom and all non-voting members and guests my watch the Zoom meeting on a Livestream, on Facebook or YouTube.

Zoom has a Polling feature. This can be turned on from the web interface for meetings, and controlled by the meeting host. Polls can be configured before the meeting or created instantly during the meeting - up to 25 polls can be used in one Zoom meeting. Polls can be configured to be public or anonymous. If participants have registered for the meeting using their email addresses their responses can be recorded by Zoom, and a report can be generated (remember to download within 30 days after the meeting). Anonymous polls just record the totals, and only the host (and co-hosts) can see the results. The host (and co-hosts) cannot take part in the poll. Again, it's important to make sure only voting members are offered the poll.

Recording the Meeting

If you want to later share recordings of Zoom meetings with just your members, be aware it's trivial for anyone to search for and find recordings that use the default name given by Zoom (

Washington Post⁠

). It may be better to rename the file if you are putting it in a publicly accessible location. Alternatively you can Livestream the meeting to Facebook or YouTube directly from Zoom, that has some other advantages.

YouTube Livestream

Zoom can Livestream to Facebook or YouTube. This is useful for opening meetings to all registered Democrats, and to reach above the participants limit of your club's Zoom account.

⁠

https://youtu.be/yQvLxOLtrss⁠

⁠

No need to watch the whole meeting above, but it shows the quality of the Livestream to YouTube. Try turning on Closed Captioning - useful for accessibility. If you

click this link to watch on YouTube⁠

and then select the ellipsis (three dots) just underneath the video you can click to show the transcript. This is especially useful for club secretaries :) and is searchable (Control-F, or Command-F) clicking on a search result will take you straight to that part of the recording.

YouTube also offers long term storage and the ability to easily embed the video in your website, or easily share on social media.

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.