Many clubs have experienced disruption because of the Covid health emergency and are unable to run normal face-to face meetings in the way that they would always have done in the past.
Most of those clubs moved quickly to run their meetings using online conferencing tools such as Zoom or Meetup.
As time has gone by many clubs are now able to run some face-to-face meetings but must limit the number of attendees to the safe limit allowing social distancing at their venue.
easy-Speak now supports the management of this need, limiting the number of people who are able to book their attendance in person but allowing the others to attend online and managing both types of attendees.
You may limit the number of attendees for your physical meeting locations and may also set up a 'Hybrid' meeting location where physical and online attendees are managed separately - but all of them may take a part in the meeting.
Meeting Location:
The meeting location is the physical address where you plan to run your meeting - but it may also be the choice of conferencing software that you will use for your online meeting - or a combination of both physical location and choice of online conferencing tool.
This article explains how to set up your locations:
Locations An explanation of the use of locations and their maintenance in the Club Control Panel.
Creating the Meeting
Create your meeting as you would for any physical or online-only meeting - but select a location that you have set up as allowing both physical and online attendees.
This article explains how to create a meeting:
Creating a Meeting Information about creating a meeting to show in the calendar.
Running the Meeting
You may run the meeting exactly as you would for a traditional face-to-face or entirely online Toastmasters experience - but there are a few differences:
Additional choices for attendance:
You will see the choice of attending in person or attending online. Note that the physical option will not be shown if the room has reached its maximumum limit - but you may still attend online.
(The two grapic icons of a house or a computer with a tick are used on many screen to signify HOW a person will attend)
Options for a member or Guest to attend in person are not shown if the room is already full.
The VPE or Meeting Manager may add people additional to the room limit while they juggle around the role assignments and will see a red warning if the room is full.
Additional choices for accepting role assignments:
Click on whichever option is appropriate to confirm your role and also confirm attendance.
(If you have already confirmed attendance you will only see the options that are now appropriate for you)
Additional choices to volunteer for a vacant role
If you have not yet confirmed attendance, two options to take a vacant role will be presented, online and in-person.
Closing the Meeting
If you are a club officer or Meeting Manager with the system permissions to record what actually happened and close the meeting you will see the full range of otions to record who attended in person and who was online.
Note that when you use one of the buttons to save your changes there is a default attendance set for anyone who has a role but has not previously confirmed attendance.
For a hybrid meeting the presumption is that they delivered their role online.
This article explains how to close a meeting:
Recording what actually happened How to use the 'Actual' screen to record actual attendance and roles