 I have a very simple agenda. The agenda is why do we need hybrid meetings? I will be covering how to set up a hybrid meeting, we'll have a small demo, and finally, if you have any questions, I will address them in the Q&A session. First of all, I want to talk about why we need hybrid. Think about in your office what's happening, especially if you're in IT, you're in some kind of management, you will be experiencing hybrid meetings. You will be sitting around on the table, and then you will be having some discussions with your vendors from a different country. You might be having a demo of a product hybrid, you want to do it because it is a future. And the reason why it is the future is when the COVID struck and we were dragged to adapt to online. And we learned as we started figuring out how to do work online, how to do work remotely. Eventually, we figured out how to use Zoom, how to use Teams, and get our work done. But that was, of course, for a short period. That was the need of the hour. But what happens now that the COVID is over? We can all go back to work, right? We can all do things physically. But really, yes or no? Because I think what has happened in those two years is that technology has advanced so rapidly to take care of remote work that organizations have suddenly realized there is value in it. There is value in running remote projects, there is value not traveling to a different country, but using the technology which is now available, which we were not used to. And therefore, you need those face-to-face meetings. There's no doubt about it. There is nothing that can replace the experience of talking to somebody, shaking their hands, right? But there are huge cost savings. If you work remotely, if you get your projects done remotely, if you outsource to a different country, and that's what's happening. People are outsourcing even HR. People are sitting in India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and getting their work done. But how do we communicate with them? How do we communicate with them effectively? So hybrid is, therefore, that's the future. And therefore, as those masters, I believe it is important that, first of all, we get on the stage, get that excitement. But when we can't, like my wife now, is in India, and she can't be here, but she can still be part of this meeting. Give a thumbs up or a high, if you can hear me. I can hear you. All right. Okay. Thanks for the clarification. And that's why we need to add up. It is to give us the best of both worlds. It is to give us the ability to experience physical meetings as those masters. But then we cannot or when there are members who are interested to join those masters, but they can't travel, they still have that opportunity. And when they can, they will come in. So that's how we need to think about this hybrid meeting, why we need hybrid meetings. It is the future. It is the best of both worlds. It saves money and cost. And most importantly, it gives you the ability for a global reach. Today, QA challenges has members from Saudi Arabia, from Nigeria, from Sri Lanka, from Egypt, and even from USA, we have a member. So it allows us to grow. And at the same time, have members who want physical experience. And that's why we as food challenges, we have embraced hybrid meetings. We see it as a vehicle for growth. My objective today is to show you all what is it that you need to do to have an effective hybrid meeting. Now what happens is many clubs, they will try hybrid meetings and the experience that the members get is not good enough. The online audience, especially, they feel left out. You are 10 people here, enjoying, having fun, having snacks, and they are looking at you. The experience has to be inclusive. If you really want a good hybrid meeting, then the online audience should feel the same experience as the one of you. And therefore that means there has to be some kind of a minimum standard that you need to have. And what's the minimum standard that whatever is said in this room, you all should be able to hear us and whatever you say, we should be able to. And that's the key, hearing. If you can hear, I think the rest of the challenge is easy, which is to see. There is a saying which says, audience will listen to you if they can hear what you're saying. They'll forgive you if your video is bad, but they'll not forgive you if they can't understand what you're saying. So the first part that we need to solve is the audio. And that will depend upon where are you having the hybrid meeting? Is the hybrid meeting in a small room, in a conference room, like this, for example, which we have here, which sits about 20 people? Or is it a big hall? Because for each environment, your setup, how you create that hybrid environment will change. If you can overcome that challenge, overcome the challenge of people in the online able to listen to what the physical audience is saying and us in the physical room able to hear what you're saying, you have corrected the code of hybrid meeting. And we usually suffer from it. Why? Because we try to use our laptops. We try to use our phones. And the problem with that is that these phones and these laptops will never design for hybrid. They're designed for one person sitting maybe half a meter. The moment you step back two meters from the laptop, you lost the audio. And I'm sure you face this experience whenever you try to do maybe a contest and you want to stand up and deliver your speech. And suddenly you're two meters away from the laptop and your judges can't hear what you're saying. So you need to correct the code for the audio. How could I set up a hybrid meeting for a room like this? One of the Toastmaster clubs would have something like this. The only investment if you are as a club going to do is the investment in the audio. And this I believe is the lowest bar you can set yourself. You can go higher but this could be for a room of this size minimum. And so what is it? It is what we call the speakerphone. It works as a two in one device. Costs around 30 KD. It can pick up the sound from the entire room. And also the audience can hear from this speaker. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to connect this device to a mobile. And this mobile will run the Zoom meeting. The first thing I would do is switch it on. And it's going to run on Bluetooth. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to run Zoom on this. I'm not used to iPhones by the way. This is my wife's old phone and I'll join the meeting. Here's the password. And now comes the most important part in hybrid meetings, what we call Echo. If there are two devices connected in the meeting then they will cause an Echo. Right now there is one device which you are listening to me. And if I was to do it, shall we try it out? What happens? Recording in progress. So I'm sure you are seeing now the Echo. How do I get rid of the Echo? Go here. Go here. And I disconnected the audio from this device. So only one device is running. And that's very important. Right now I have a couple of devices here, some laptops here. And I have made sure that they are all disconnected from the audio. If you click on the participant list in the meeting room you'll find that some of the users don't have their audio symbol next to them. That means they are not connected on audio. And that's why we are not getting Echo. What I do is I normally put this over here. A tripod is nice. Not necessary, but it is nice to have a tripod. So this is the device or the phone that will be used. Notice that I have connected it to some power bank so that we can last for the two hours without any problem. The meeting is running on the phone. And if I was to stand here and deliver, and perhaps the traffic can spotlight me now as a speaker, this is the view that the online audience will see when a speaker is on the stage. So a very simple setup that connects the phone. So that's one view. The mobile phone connected to a good audio device that has both microphone as well as the speaker. And then if you come over here I have my laptop. So what I'm going to do is notice also that this is not connected to audio, right? It is also disconnected. But let me switch on the video. So this is the view of the audience and what I have done is I have connected a laptop with a simple webcam over there and finally connect the laptop to a TV. In this case, we are blessed with a very nice TV over here. Let me switch it on. So our hybrid meeting essentially is set up. And what we have done is we have a mobile running zoom which will display the switch with a speaker and a laptop connected to a TV and a webcam. Now this webcam I think is optional because some people what they can do is they could place the laptop itself little higher so you can get the view and that would be perfectly okay. So that is how we can set up hybrid meeting but now we are actually in a hybrid meeting. All the time I was just demonstrating on another phone but now this is what the experience of a hybrid meeting will look like a phone connected to a small audio device and a laptop connected to a TV. With the simple understanding of audio and acoustics and what works within this room we can have a reasonably good hybrid meeting. Now what I am going to do is we are going to demonstrate to you how this setup would sound like for you all and for us because at the end of the day the experience should be equally good for not only you but also for us we should be able to hear you and you should be able to hear what we are saying. And the best way to do that is to run a simple table topic session and to do that we have a wonderful lady who will act as a table topic master and we will have some table topics that are addressed by some audience members physically and some online. So to run the session I call upon Dr. Nasreen to guide us through a short table topic session as a demo of a hybrid meeting. Dr. Nasreen over to you. Thank you so much Toast master of the day and our trainer DTM Kajatin. Good evening everyone I welcome one and all to this wonderful training session and specially to the table topic session. So what is table topics? Well table topics helps our members to practice the art of improvisation and also helps us think on our feet. This helps us to develop four vital communication skills listening thinking organizing and delivering. Here you are given the opportunity to practice impromptu. The first question is if you want the rainbow you have to put up with the rain. There is our DDE very fast and prompt. Toast master Shiraz if you want the rainbow you have to put up with rain. Ladies and gentlemen if you want the rainbow it has to be rain. You have to first train then rainbow. You have to make some efforts first to get the rewards. A person says no I don't want to make any efforts I want to sleep and I want to wake up plate but I want all the rewards I want money luxury life and I want everything how can it be? If you want something you have to satisfy something. I remember my father always used to say that when visitors come to my home Shiraz go and speak to them why are you always at home inside your home you are staying go there are people go and serve them but me a backward person used to always sit behind ok papa I will do it just grab something and give it to them and go back and do my own work which affected me that I feel nervousness when I am coming in front of you this is I felt it till now my father has told this 15-20 years before but still I feel it and now I don't regret because I am in front of you all front of the whole audience and online audience and I am speaking to you all so the best thing best part is you have to make efforts you have to make efforts to get the rewards you need rain to get the rain thank you so much thank you so much now over to our trainer and TMOD thank you Dr. Nasreen for first of all demonstrating to us how a hybrid meeting can be effective and quite engaging in fact we had fun during the table topic session we could hear everybody clearly and we could of course engage with the person who is standing on the stage as well as when you are delivering speeches online we could hear clearly of course you have also seen the challenges of hybrid meeting it's not the technology generally the breaking point or the weakest link is usually our internet connections said so a mobile phone is good enough to run hybrid meeting with a laptop and a small display but you need to have good internet connection because if you don't then you will have the experience that is not optimal so if you have a good and especially in COVID I don't see it as a problem everybody's phone has a 5G in fact I'm running all of this on phones only I don't have any Wi-Fi or special router this just has 4G somewhere this one has a 5G and that's it this is part of our package that we are using the solution was used other than the audio take care of the audio I would just like to share my experience with the hybrid setup my club is purely online so we have online meetings and alhamdulillah we are doing great only once we happen to have a hybrid session during one of the event gathering that we had conducted and we didn't have any complicated stuff there was only laptop and mobile and alhamdulillah I think we did fine the last DTAC I was participating and somewhere down the line or in my heart I always had a feeling that if you are participating or contesting in a hybrid setup the chances of winning is low but trust me when Toastmaster Namedi won in table topics it really boosted my confidence to all those who have not yet started the hybrid thing or have not experienced and thanks to our trainer and district 20 go for it you can not only have wonderful meetings and connect with people globally but you can even contest and win so this is what I wanted to just add that it is a beautiful thing and we should upgrade ourselves and hybrid setup or hybrid meeting is the thing and it is doable you can win it we have a winner here thank you so much trainer and now I would like to hand over the podium to our PR manager of the district 20 let him share his thoughts how he thinks and maybe for any initiatives he has for hybrid meetings he has experimented with hybrid meetings before I know that so I would love to him to share with us his insight on the whole topic thank you medium question thank you so very much well coming straight to the point what is the future of hybrid now I know the very term hybrid itself it means combining two elements and here we are talking about an element of an environment where we are in physical meeting and online meeting the very word itself means it is quite special it is hybrid and it talks about inclusiveness now the hybrid meeting actually the future is quite promising because it revolutionize the way how we have been interacting how we exchange our ideas and how we participate but also how we forge large contracts I'm sure hybrid is not something actually new because if you see your board meetings or probably if you have seen the movie Charlie's Angel Charlie is actually having a hybrid session with his angels and he got it right the audio has to be correct so that's how it is it is not something very new I know the skills and we are also facing a lot of challenges you when you adapt to a new environment you will face challenges but understand once you go about the learning curve and when you have your own checklist all these things will become very simple because you will not be restricted to boundaries and it could save you a lot of financials save you a lot of logistics an airline travels to a local transportation in a traffic so something in that variety of spectrum it helps you in that with the logistics so I think a hybrid has got a lot of future and it is just that we have to go understand the skills and make it more simpler and standardize so that anybody can use that that is what I feel about Latif is an expert also in hybrid meetings he runs amazing hybrid meetings for Bhavan Stores Masters Club let him share his thoughts on how he does it and from what we have done today is it something different or is it the same but in a different package? Thank you DPM Catherine lovely audience and audience online my only thing was you learn by doing the moment we shifted from zoom meetings only after COVID to hybrid meetings initial settings were really difficult as DPM Catherine said that yes it has to come one hour before I used to also struggle a lot then we bought one device another device finally now the setup is so well we can use of this speakerphone we use a speakerphone speaker connected to bluetooth and the camera and speakerphone is connected to the laptop so and we have a projector so everything is connected the projector is connected with the another PC laptop of the school so the purpose all last few meetings for the last couple of three months we are going live streaming if you get a chance you can look at our meetings and you will feel the difference thank you once again if you feel like doing it don't think about it just start thank you finally let me invite from a division director perspective can you why point of view of hybrid meetings previously we conducted our meetings our area division DTECH was hybrid but area and division was online meetings most of the member our member said why we do not have physical meetings why we do not have hybrid meetings now it's an opportunity because this trick has announced that if we want we can have hybrid meetings and I would like to thank DTM Kajdan Dr. Kajdan it is really she is very forgiving to say doctor because you are specialized in technology so I request all the members try it in your clubs you can fail first time, second time, third time full time you will be achieving your goals and objectives so try it and I will be trying in my club as well because we have few members abroad in UK and mostly we are having physical meetings we will try to connect him as well with hybrid meetings if you want to try just try it, if you fail no problem, no harm done you have learned something in the process and learning is always good and learning hybrid I think is a skill that will help you in your work or anywhere you go