Last night at Code for Boston we used a Meeting Owl to host a hybrid meeting for our Urban League Heat Pump Accelerator Group. You can see our setup below:

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Why It Matters

Meeting Owl solves three problems:

• Getting in-person folks on camera without having to get everyone into Zoom on their own laptops.
• Provides a good speaker for virtual speakers.
• Provides a good microphone to transmit voice from in-person attendees to virtual.

What is Missing

For hybrid meetings you never have enough screens. I would love to have a hybrid meeting room with the following large screens available:

• The code or slides I am sharing.
• The grid view of virtual participants from Zoom would make a difference in making virtual people feel more present in-person in addition to the primary display that currently only shows the active speaker.
• The Zoom chat, zoomed to view, along with posted links auto-translated into scannable QR codes would be ideal.

MeetingOwl does a better job of solving putting in-person people into the cloud than putting online people into the room.

Never Do This

If you are in a hybrid meeting and a virtual participant, do not keep your camera off. It is hard to tell you are present. Especially if Zoom is set to hide participants without cameras.