Thank you @KarenVChin for this post, and for making our working method public, so that it can help others organize virtual meet-ups in an organized and effective way.
But let me add a few notes that couldn’t have fit into the post.
Connect is a global community. A Community that never sleeps, we could say.
Connect is a community where friendships can be born between people who live in very distant parts of the world.
I can confidently say that Karen and I were friends long before we met in person, thanks to the amazing community that is Connect. So amazing that I once called it“The Global Village”.
To keep these friendships alive and strong, virtual meet-ups are a fundamental tool. They allow us to virtually meet those who perhaps we will never be able to meet in person. They allow us to discover cultures, foods and traditions different from our own, told directly by those who live them.
This is why Karen and I started organizing virtual meet-ups long before these became “official”. Therefore, when the pandemic arrived, we were already ready, and this allowed us to start immediately with some “virtual” meet-up.
Creating virtual meet-ups, especially for people like Karen and I who live nine hours apart, is an exciting experience. We spend hours discussing the structure of the meet-up, choosing images to use in the slides, rehearsing the times to make sure we stay within the scheduled 60 minutes.
We use shared Google documents (Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms) and create an album in Google Photos that we can both contribute to
We really enjoy organizing virtual meet-ups, so we have done more of them. Little by little we have developed a method to make virtual meet-ups attractive and fun. A method that today we are happy to share with the entire Community, because virtual meet-ups break down barriers and borders.