 leaders of District 20. Let's start with a small and short poll. In this poll, what I want to understand from my audience is how many of you all have attended a hybrid meeting before? So I'm getting interesting results. A majority of you have not attended a hybrid meeting. Well, guess what? After this session, you can officially say, I have attended a hybrid meeting because you are in a hybrid meeting. You don't believe me? I have already set up a hybrid meeting for you. It is organized by none other than one of my clubs, Kuwait Challengers. Unfortunately, I don't seem to see many members in the physical meeting. What's going on there? Good morning, District 20 leaders and DTM Cajetan and welcome to Kuwait Challengers Postmaster's hybrid meeting. If you are unable to see anybody at the meeting room right now, it's because the meeting has just started and most of the members are at the entrance and Sergeant Adams is checking their mobile for the Immune Act to see if they are vaccinated so that they can enter this premises for the meeting. I see. So it means you are only allowing people who have been fully immunized, is it? Yes, that's to follow the norms that is required. You meant to say even the President has not come for the meeting? No, he hasn't. He is at an event and I'm hoping and looking forward to him attending this meeting. This will be the first meeting. He should be present here. For the other audience members, I apologize. I am the President. I am supposed to be there, but I am conducting this session for you. But Priscilla, let me do something more interesting. Why don't I bring the entire district to your hybrid meeting? Wouldn't that be fun? That would be excellent. Alright. To have 184 members at our hybrid meeting would be an amazing thing. Let's see how we can do that before we get into the hybrid meeting. Let us first for understand what a hybrid meeting is. And to do that, I have a simple presentation explaining to you the concept. Why hybrid meeting? What it means for us going forward in Toastmasters? So what is a hybrid meeting? Essentially, a hybrid meeting is a combination of people meeting in person and other people meeting online. I recently did this hybrid meeting that you see a picture here in one of the corporate clubs. They are united. I am their club mentor and I wanted to write an article for Toastmasters. They had reached out to me and said, Kaji, can you write an article on hybrid meetings? So I created this setup to first of all, take nice pictures to include in the article, but also to make sure that the technology is right, that I've got everything that I'm talking about in that article spot on. But going forward, the idea of hybrid meetings will have to change. And I'm talking about this, not only from the perspective of Toastmasters, but the life that I see in the corporate world as well. Consider hybrid meeting, not in the strict definition of physical and online, but a mixture of physical and online. So the group of people here, a group of people there, some joining only online, we need to start picking up the skills of hybrid meeting. And as we start getting immunized and meeting in person, hybrid meeting is something we should all start exploring. So what do we need to conduct a hybrid meeting? First point, and that's right, you need a laptop with internet, a good internet, as all of you have said. But as we will see beyond that, everything is optional. You don't have to think that you need the best technology to conduct a hybrid meeting. Yes, we do need a microphone. We'll come to that. We need a speaker so that the people sitting in the room should be able to hear the people talking online very clearly. You need cameras so that the people, you, audience, should be able to see Priscilla. She's in the hybrid meeting right now. You need a display because all of you should be visible to the people who are sitting in that room. So that is the components of a hybrid meeting. If you think about it, a laptop has all of those five components that I just mentioned. I mean, it's a laptop with internet, but it has a camera. It has a display. She can see us on that display. It has a speaker because when I speak, she can hear from the laptop and it has a microphone. The idea is that simply using a laptop in a hybrid setup in a big room might not work. And I'm sure you know why, even though it is capable of conducting a hybrid meeting, why do you think a laptop on its own would not be sufficient? Hard to hear because the speaker is very tiny on that laptop. Not many people can hear it. Hard to see also because the screen is very small. Quality of sound might be bad. Even the microphone might be bad if people are speaking from a distance. What do we do? What is the minimum that as a club that we can do? We need to be able to go to a location and quickly set up, not waste too much time. The minimum that in my opinion you need is to take care of the microphone and the sound because sound is so important in any situation in an online meeting. And so here I have a device that Priscilla will demonstrate to you now that she has connected to the laptop. So that's a very small device. It doesn't cost much, but that's the only investment is required to conduct this meeting. So only issue will be the display and we'll get to that. So you can think about going to your hybrid meeting with a laptop and that small device and start the meeting. Let's see how a hybrid meeting would actually work in practice. You can imagine a couple of people sitting on the sofa. If this is a actual meeting room, maybe they'll be sitting in chairs. So she has a laptop here. I have placed it a little high so that it is at the eye level and the device is next to her. So that's the connections as of now. Priscilla, can you say something so that we can all hear you? Good morning once again and welcome back. We are still waiting because our time is very particular and ensuring that we have just the members who have been vaccinated in this room. You might be asking why are there two views? There is a view which shows the entire audience and there is one view which is showing only Priscilla. As I have mentioned to you, the view that you see of Priscilla is from the laptop and for the other view, which you can see here, what I have done is really I have connected a mobile device to this meeting. There are two logins. One is called Priscilla, which is a co-host that she's running the meeting. The other one is the audience view, which is actually just a mobile device, but it is not connected with sound so that there is no echo. The final bit of thing that we might want to do is connect that laptop to some display. So those who are sitting around the sofa might be able to see all of us on the screen. So you can consider maybe if you have a TV in the room that would be great or you could carry a projector as we used to do in the old days. And so as she switches on the TV, you will see yourself on the TV. So please make sure that you switch on your camera so you appear in the hybrid meeting right in our living room. There you can see the entire audience in the gallery view. The people sitting in the room can see what's going on in online meeting. And now we can conduct a hybrid meeting. Priscilla has some ideas in mind. She wants to conduct with your table topics. Due to time restrictions, two lucky members will be able to speak in this hybrid meeting. And I would like to see you all raise your hands and take part. And I'll hand over to Priscilla to conduct the table topic session. Welcome once again, members of District 20 and any guests attending this hybrid meeting. I see Murli, his hands raised to take up this table topic.