 So, let me give an official welcome to this session where we're going to be talking about building successful online events. Obviously, over the past year, online events have really taken off. We've been doing it for a little longer than that, but we've got a lot of experience from the last 18 months year in particular. And we're going to just go through that and also hear from your experiences, which is obviously crucial to this sort of peer-to-peer training session or learning event at CBA 15. I just want to introduce myself. My name is Matt Wright. I work for the International Institute for Environment and Development and manage lots of the digital projects here at the Institute. Assisting me is Teresa Soroka, who you may well know as she is one of the key organizers of CBA 15. She's also a project manager in our climate change research group. And also assisting is Georgina Diaz who works with me at IID and she'll be sort of handling lots of the technical aspects. We're going to start with some housekeeping. And I want to make clear that we're recording this meeting, so do bear that in mind. You've probably seen a lot of this before already at CBA 15 sessions and other digital events. Whilst this is important, I'm also going to take the opportunity to talk about why it's important, if that makes sense. Because it can be easy to dismiss, you know, this is just the standard stuff you go through at the start of an online session. But there's a reason that there is always the standard stuff at the start of an online session and that's because it's really important to take the security precautions notice, for example. So we've taken various precautions and we urge people not to share the link on social media. And the reason for that is because people can join the session if you give them the opportunity and disrupt it and interrupt it. And that's a real risk for your organization. If you're live streaming events, you know, these things can go out to lots of people that they can take on a life of their own and be quite damaging. So that security aspect is really vital. You can control in person events when you can see people a lot more easily. So you have to really be sure that you've got everything tied down from this perspective, the connection issue at the bottom there is also vital. So, you know, the biggest problem in these online events, undoubtedly is the quality of the internet connection. And this will come up a lot today in this session, I'm sure. So the key is, you know, to encourage people as much as possible to close sort of anything they don't need. So they can run the meeting as well as possible as quickly as possible. We're going to microphones are muted, but we'll be having breakout sessions later when you'll be able to speak and share experiences. Please contribute comments and questions via the chat box throughout be great to see what's going on, what views you have throughout throughout the entire session and we'll certainly be considering those at the end in the Q&A. So share your webcam be great to see you actually see you if you can, but bear in mind that that takes extra bandwidth. So if there are any issues, do turn your video off. In case you haven't done before the participants box opens a panel on the right where you can see everyone else and interact with us all, and also the chat icon next to it. These are all the bottom of your screen, where you can download open up a box where you can enter comments and questions. Alternatively, you can request technical support Georgina's on hand, and we will prioritize any issues that you have. And finally with disabled the screen sharing and recording options for participants. Sorry, not finally there's one more I beg your pardon and that's that you can use the reactions to share immediate feedback as well so tell us what you're liking what you dislike what you agree with that way if you want. Yeah, but to those who've just arrived and do update your name and let us know who you are in your organization, you can go to the more and rename in the participants hover above your name you'll find that that helps us just keep track of who's who and makes everything a bit more personal. And then here's another nice shot of to razor that we had in our template file, if you want to hide non video participants, you can do so and so you can see more of who is in the call. The chat box is particularly important because we do want people to interact and engage with the session. And, you know, we want to engage with people we want to know what people are thinking and their views, and we'll get to as many comments, and so on as we can throughout this entire session. So the intro section and why that intro section is important because people can only engage and interact if they understand how to do so obviously. We're now going to go into a couple of quick polls. The first one is really we really want to get a sense of how, how many sort of of these online events people have participated in, or even engaged in. Now you can see on the screen there's two polls there. The first one is sort of looking at trying to gauge experience and sort of work out where we're coming from as we as we as we run this session. No surprise to see that people lost the first, the first answer is lots, just because you know that's the way things are going at the moment. And then in the second question keen to sort of explore what people find the most valuable things from an online meeting that they've that they want as a participant. You know, is it hearing from experts. Is it the opportunity to ask questions themselves. Is it the opportunity to actually speak. There's a difference between writing in a chat box and actually having, you know, having the ability to to contribute verbally and having that direct engagement. And then there's interaction engagement with the panel and other participants direct discussion among smaller groups so that's more the breakout room side of things, contacts networking security aspect that we talked about. And then the final one is sort of how important is it to be able to access recordings of events afterwards. That's particularly useful when you know you can't attend the online events, typically organizers will send around the recording afterwards. So if something comes up, then that doesn't matter so much. Okay, sort of as expected people are regularly or attending these events. You know, once new, which is great we can skip over some of the sort of the more basic elements as we go on the session. And then I don't think it's a surprise that actually engage the interaction engagement has come up as key in the answers whilst hearing from experts and so on is the joint top there. It's the interaction engagement that features strongly so it's actually being able to direct questions that you care about to the panel to talk to other participants and so on. That's really useful thank you very much. So we're going to go on now to the types of events that we're going to be looking at. So obviously with the COVID-19 pandemic, and particularly sort of the inability to travel and meet up in person, there's been a real seismic shift in mindset, mainly around how we work digitally. And I think this is most readily noticeable in our online events. So people who didn't really engage with ways to collaborate and communicate digitally beforehand are now being forced to because there's no other way they can do their work. So they can't run, they can't meet people that can't run sessions any other way. And even those who were doing so beforehand are now finding that they need to be more aware of the challenges and the obstacles that arise they need to know how to do it better. So briefly in this session, we're going to look at, we're going to hear some experiences of running events. We're going to have some breakout groups and give people the chance to talk to one another and share their experiences. We'll probably just have one breakout group. We'll see who else joins in the meantime. We'll talk about the opportunities and challenges online that the events offer. We're then also going to focus on CBA in particular. We've got Theresa with us, who is obviously organized, one of the key organizers last year in the shift to an online event from an in-person event last year. And obviously this year as well was the follow-up. So there's lots of lessons to be learned there, and particularly from last year's event to this year's event, how do things change. And then we'll have a Q&A at the end. As I say, do put any comments and questions in the chat box. So I just wanted to reference here that there are lots of different types of events that we're talking about. You know, there is the bog standard meetings, calls, meetups that where a few of you are just calling to catch up. There are more detailed webinars and seminars where you make presentations where there is a Q&A, question and answer session at the end. There are workshops where you might collaborate using whiteboards and tools that allow you to make notes and share notes, collaboratively, everyone sees the same document and can do so. There's training sessions like this where you can sort of play recordings and that kind of thing. There's speeches, there's film screenings, you can premiere films and videos. There are conferences such as CBA 15, and then there's sort of discussions and dialogues where there's a high level of interactivity. So there's a whole range of things to consider when you're looking at online events. And whilst the principles are similar throughout, there are all kinds of tools and all kinds of systems you can use to perform these events and lay on these events and enable people to participate, all have their pros and cons. We're going to hear in a moment from some of the researchers at IID who have run these events, organized these events, they've had to switch from in-person to digital with one or more of these examples that I'm giving. And we're going to hear in their words, you know, the sort of the challenges that they came up against and so on. So from IID's perspective, just want to touch on this briefly, that there are many assets that we found from running these online events. The most obvious is the increase in attendance. You can have a colleague of mine recently wrote a blog about our sort of year-long experience. She's our external events officer. And in the course of that, we looked at all the data that we had and we realized that we'd had a 300% increase in attendance. Being able to join at the click of a button means a great increase in reach, even taking account of the technological challenges that might pose. Importantly, though, it's not just the reach that online events really gives you the opportunity to do. Increasing geographical diversity. So we've had participants from 118 countries join our online event at IID. And it's also the diversity of speakers. So beforehand, three quarters of our speakers were UK based when we were running in-person events. Now we can get the best people, the best speakers, the most relevant speakers from across the world. So we can have government officials, we can have civil society and community representative grassroots representatives, youth activists from across the globe. And we've registered a doubling in the non-UK speakers that we've been able to have in sessions and share their experiences. I don't want this session to be all me talking at all, although that's been the case thus far. So I want to get some more voices involved. And I mentioned we've got some of our researchers that who can share their experiences. And we're going to start with Olivia Wilson Holt. So she's a researcher in our biodiversity team, IID, and she ran a series of workshops with a select invited group of people around the illegal wildlife trade work around that. So she's going to talk about issues around registering for events in particular and some of the digital tools you can use, including Mentimeter and Mural, which is a collaborative whiteboard tool. Here we go. Dillis and I were involved in a series of seven online learning events between September and December last year. And normally sessions have taken place in person, but obviously we weren't able to do that this time. And these particular sessions were designed to take participants through each step of the flood methodology so that they could understand how they might be able to use it in the future where they work. We were contracted by the IUCN East and Southern Africa or IZARO office to develop their content for the sessions, handle the registration, provide a platform which was Zoom in the end, conduct the sessions and also support on the M&E. We held these every two weeks over a period of three months and each session was two hours long. So because IZARO wanted to capture certain information due to donor requirements, we decided to use Eventbrite to ask a preset list of invited participants to register for each of the sessions. We had a few issues at the beginning because the link was forwarded by participants to others who hadn't been invited. And this was a bit of a problem because one of the donors has a strict attendee criteria, meaning everyone had to be vetted in advance. And also because the series was intended for a very specific audience from East African community partner states. We stopped having to email a few people and asked that they not attend. And going forward, we then ensured that all the Eventbrite parades were private, so they could only be accessed with a particular link and not found on Google or anything. So we had overall 120 different people attend one or more of the seven sessions and had about 40 people on average per session. It was quite content heavy. It was a lot of PowerPoint slides. But we did try and make them as interactive as we could by using Mentimeter and mural. We did think about halfway through of introducing breakout rooms, but decided against it in the end because we probably only had out of those 40 people attending, maybe 10 or 15 people who were really engaged and who actually contributed in the sessions. And because different people joined each time it just, it kind of felt like it wouldn't really work properly. Read Mentimeter and mural we struggle to get full partition participation on Mentimeter. Even in the later sessions when people had used it before and when they were more used to it, and we never really figured out why this was going to happen. So we did have to spend quite a bit of time the first time we used it to explain how it worked, what to do and what not to do. And because there were so many people on the call and people had quite bad internet problems. I wouldn't say we hugely used it probably as effectively as it could have been used. We have a monkey at the end of the series and responses showed that people did like both mural and Mentimeter, but that because they hadn't used them before they didn't, you know, they weren't aware of how they worked. So in the future we probably have to build in some more time to go through them properly so that we could make full use of them. So I guess one of the main reflections we had as a group was that the series would have probably been more effective and interactive with a much smaller audience. So the fact that not everyone joined each session, and because some participants as I said was so much more engaged than others, meant it was hard to develop any sort of kind of connection with, and between the other participants. So it encouraged people to post in the chat and to ask questions, but I think we could have made more space for sharing experiences and sharing knowledge with a smaller group, and this was reflected also in the survey monkey responses because participants kind of when they were asked about what they would change. They really liked the sessions but again they wanted them to be more interactive and possibly with some more kind of practical elements like giving a presentation or something like that. Okay, so that was live with the first example of her sessions. A couple of key points to pick up there I think was she, she was describing the tools that were being used. You know, I think that reinforces what I was saying earlier in terms of how, you know, you need to explain the tools you have to spend quite a lot of time on those tools early on in order to get the value in the session. And also I want to talk a bit about accessibility at this stage before before we go on to the next person. So these clips that that I'm showing you are excerpts from a sort of internal learning and sharing event that we ran at ID where we wanted our staff to learn from the experiences of other stuff. Theresa was among those who contributed to that session. What we did was we recorded that session, which means now we have the ability to repurpose elements for events such as these, which wouldn't be as easy to do at an in person event. And you'll see that we've also taken the time to add subtitles to the text. This is really important because people absorb things information in different ways, regardless of language difficulties, you know, people are different some people like hearing information some like seeing information. Some people like seeing it visually and can comprehend it better that way. So you really want to make try to make your information available in a variety of ways to suit your audience. Also, because the session was recorded. They didn't have to be here we didn't have to ask them to attend this in order to share their share the lessons that they had. And we don't have to worry about connection issues with them and doing the testing beforehand. And also we can, we can make these videos available for others for everyone to watch again afterwards. And so we know throughout this will be adding links in the chat box where you can do exactly that. I'm going to move on to the next one now, who is another researcher in our natural resources group. Christina Swiderska, who held a very ambitious series of workshops. And before I show her, I'm going to share an example of what that ambition actually looks at. So in this short excerpt. We're going to see a live stream live streamed workshop that took place from the side of a mountain in Peru. And also translation so there's English translation over the speaker. So how those changes in the landscapes are having a moving. So the collaboration with scientists and doing this research allow us to respond to a specific problems that we have. So it could be, it could be past, it could be. I'll give you a very short, short excerpt of that. But hopefully you can see that see the fact that it is on the side of the mountain. And that will tee up Christina's short presentation. This was meant to be a two day workshop, and we've split it up into four webinars over four days. With this workshop, two key objectives were developing new interdisciplinary research. So networking, partnership building, or a key objective, including, you know, between different sectors and between different actors. And another key objective was meaningfully engaging indigenous peoples in that process. Making this a virtual event was quite a virtual workshop was challenging, giving those objectives. But actually, you know, when we got down to thinking about it and planning it, we saw that there was real opportunity provided by going virtual. We had a small budget just enough for like 30 people. But we ended up having more than 130 participants, even though we tried to keep it small. And critically, we had many more indigenous people involved and presenting them could have done, you know, with the budget that we had, we had 28 indigenous participants, rather than five. And they came from, you know, different regions, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Arctic. So we were able to completely redesign the event to make indigenous speakers the main focus and the main speakers for the whole event. And I think that was quite a powerful thing, way to do it. I think, you know, we were recognizing indigenous peoples as experts, they were sharing knowledge with academics with UN agencies with others. So it was kind of trying to change the usual format where they're listening to others who are considered the experts. We kept each of them at the same time each day. So, starting at 11, the two or three hours because of the time difference between Peru and China, and some of the a few of the presentations were pre recorded because of the time difference. So going virtual enabled this interaction that we just saw with the communities in the potato park. And actually, you know, we were really lucky to have this partner in Peru, Alejandro Aguimedo, who's a real technical wizard. And, you know, he set up all the equipment and we were, we were able to give him our, some of our travel budget about 6000 US dollars to buy, you know, good equipment. And he worked with the communities to develop the script and different actors in the communities presented they started with a ceremony to the mountain gods and you could see in some of the shots you could see the mountains really well when they were focusing on the landscape. And so you really felt that you were part of this ceremony you were in the community and then they were explaining their beliefs and their values and how that relates to their food system. And I think it was a real eye opener for a lot of the academics we had more than 50 academics from UK universities from Q gardens. And I think it was probably the first time they had acknowledged that indigenous peoples are experts that they have tremendous knowledge and tremendous values that are really important. So, you know, a couple of things that that pulled out was really sort of how you can reshape redesign events to give them a different focus. So in this instance to really highly highlight the expertise of indigenous peoples. And she also talked about the equipment needed. So the equipment side of things can often be daunting. And it's sort of pointing out that we also held a sort of separate sessions with Alejandro and and other sort of indigenous communities in China and in Kenya, where we shared all those lessons that we learned from running that first event in Peru, and could, you know, and and helped the other communities to be able to do similar and shared that knowledge and that experience. Finally, we're going to talk about language, which is another key element of online events. So zoom itself offers lots of translation functions. And now we're going to hear from ID chief economist Paul steel, who's going to talk about language and his experiences there. So yeah on the issue of translation which is both a challenge and an opportunity and using remote platforms. I just want to give three examples of what I've been using along with others. The first and most basic one is you literally just have someone in the call who speaks more than one language. So if you have a small call with about 10 people where we've had English and French speakers or Portuguese and English and French speakers, we've just had one person translating. I mean, that's relatively easy because it costs nothing. It's it's immediate. It's, you know, you can ask questions if people haven't understood. It's, it's a bit clunky and slows things down. The high end option is to have the full works where you pay for simultaneous translation. You can have different channels on your zoom program if you're using zoom and I've been involved in a sort of peer learning exchange with about 75 people where we had a French channel and English channel and a Portuguese channel that worked well. I mean there were one or two technical hitches but nothing significant. The lessons learned is not to make sure that all the speakers in the plenaries don't speak English and then have translation. It's only fair if some of your main speakers speak French or Portuguese, let's say, and then translate it into English. So you need to think about when you develop your, your speakers that you have a multilingual set of speakers. And then the final example I want to talk about is where we had a kind of hybrid where we had a workshop in Bangkok for Thai speakers. And we wanted them to not have to where have their computers and headphones on. So we had just the, but we need to understand the Thai and our presentation needed to be translated into Thai. Basically we had the translators in the room in Bangkok with all the Thai speakers and the translators had a headset on and would listen to us speaking in English and then translating to Thai. And when the Thai speakers spoke Thai, they would speak back to us in English. I mean that worked relatively well. It meant, however, that we, that we couldn't get much of a sense of the meeting because you obviously don't see all the speakers, you just see the translators from our side. But in terms of avoiding the need for the bulk of your audience to have equipment, it makes it much more straightforward for them. So those are the three options we've used to translation and all of them basically have pros and cons. Thanks. So that's the final one from Paul Steele talking about language. Obviously, you know, having online events offers lots of opportunities for language is also one of the more challenging aspects to address as he was going through the pros and cons. I've seen the comments that you love this idea of recording and adding subtitles. Yes, it is really effective. And it's something that immediately sort of takes takes it up another level in terms of comprehension and being able to to reuse things and make make the most out of your resources. That's enough from hearing from us, I think. I want to hear from all of you and speak in a little bit more depth. So we're going to go into, I think, just one breakout group. So we're going to ask two key questions in these breakout groups. And this is really, you know, we want to hear from you. So the two questions are what are what are the biggest benefits of online events. And what are the greatest challenges. So we just wanted to feed back briefly from the two sessions. Tracy, do you want to go first. Too many windows as always. Yes. With online. I just by mistake I think opened five extra windows. I think it was a lot of I think it resonates what we know what we've been talking about and what people brought up. The main thing I think that everyone kind of agreed on is this further reach the outreach in terms of the participants and also the speakers and how that increases that the quality of the content and of the discussion being able to include so many more people. But obviously, also in terms of the quality, how many other people are shut out because of the tech and how many people we lose an opportunity to have in. It's yeah, it's it's much easier to participate when you're invited you get on an airplane. It's much more costly and everything but when you're there physically in person, even language barrier and the human you know it's. So I think the, the double edged sword of wider outreach more diversity more geographical spread. Further more, you know different ideas, but at the same time also the difficulties with the tech. I really liked the people saying that just in fact that considering especially locked down that we're able to connect constant said here we are we're able to laugh and talk together. Like how amazing is that that we're all locked down in our own homes but we're still able to still chat and catch up. And yeah, I think tech and everything kind of is is the, the participation and the being able to go as we brought up this thing about, and I think it goes to what you were saying also in a way Matt about people take information in different ways and learn different ways and the online having the recordings for her she was like, that's been like a huge benefit you just absorb in a different way if you're able to go back to it and how amazing of a resource that is. And I think lots everyone that's gone online has tried to know we're building these databases and libraries of resources online resources that you can just kind of take at your own pace. So yeah there's there's a few more things that I'll write down after but those were a bit of the highlights that come to mind. Excellent thanks very much we we touched on some of those things as well. And just a couple of things to add I suppose is that, you know, we, I think we really focused on the interaction and the engagement. And, you know, you can't simply just move plan what you might have planned for not for an in person event online. It just doesn't work the same the same way and the interaction is key. You know, you can, you can tell when the effort has been put in was was a key comment. And so that, you know, these tools that we that we use and we are using now whether it's breakout groups or polls or so on. You know, these things are what we do to be interactive and engaging, but you know there is there is a threshold by way by which they themselves become fatiguing. If every cba session has a breakout group then at some point you're going to get bored of a breakout group. Sometimes you just want to sit and listen. Yes, exactly yeah so. So, so you know that there can't be an assumption that just because we think these things are engaging interactive that that's how the audience takes them I think is the key thing. We talked about, you know, the, the greater options that are available in terms of, you know, now you can join anything all over the world and you can invite people to attend who you wouldn't necessarily have invited or they wouldn't have considered coming to an event where as they might, you know, if it's online and the opportunities that gives. I think Danny was who said, you know, this was all possible before but but now it's actually happening. And we can, you know, we're benefiting from that. Annette pointed out that a lot is Eurocentric. So even with cba we use cba as an example. She's based in Australia and even though we've worked hard at cba to have sort of three different time slots so as many people as possible can can engage the earlier session for her is five o'clock in the in the evening, which is obviously sort of after working hours. So it's it's more difficult for it's still even if you're put time effort into that, you know, it still might not suit everybody. We talked about the power imbalances that can both be more, more important. So sort of dominant people can be more dominant. And also how it's also sometimes easier for people who are less confident to be able to contribute whether it's by chat box or things like that. And, you know, how it's harder to know really who is in the room. It's about building relationships we touched on relationships quite a lot. In terms of we, I think Dan it was you said you know he's made more connections than ever over the past sort of 12 months, but maybe not as meaningful and there's there's another step to be able to sort of make those connections into sort of trusting strong relationships. And we can cover anything that has been left out in the Q&A at the end. I think. So, we've mentioned CBA a little bit there. And we're fortunate enough to have to raise her here who's sort of one of the key people who's been organizing the event for many years and sort of has led on the switch from the in person event to the online event last year and continuing it this year. So we thought we'd do a little bit of a more in depth focus just on CBA and get a bit better about it all in this session. Theresa. And that's a good way of putting it and thought about the meta level of all of this. Yeah, so I think I think one thing that we wanted I'm going to try to, because again the levels of awareness around this it seems like everyone is pretty has really good experiences and has been thinking really deeply about the, you know, going online and not so I'll try to just go really quickly over the points and then maybe we can revisit if someone wants to understand more what I was referring to or follow up on a certain point so we open up the floor. I think the main thing that for us to point out is when thinking about CBA and for us and the lessons and what take forward is the scale of CBA in that it's multiple things happening at exactly the same time. And there's the sessions happening at the same time but there's also opportunities and again this goes with touch on this Matt the point that we really wanted to be interactive. And we want people to engage in different ways and people think in different ways and people are interacting different ways feel more comfortable in some spaces or others. So we're really trying to attempt to find a different thing for different people, but that also means there's quite a lot it's not just having like one webinar or one meeting at a time. So that brings in a whole other different pros and cons and different things that we need to consider in terms of the scale and the diversity of elements that we're trying to do to try to kind of keep it interactive but again I guess there's also that element for some people it's like, you know, might be too much. I think another big thing for for us with CBA is that we've always prided ourselves in the in person CBA about that kind of interaction and the networking and people really always go back to CBA because they really loved the, the, the energy and the vibe and the spirit and the informality and people get into know each other and interacting and that's been the thing that we've all missed the most and really wanted to bring in so again for us the big emphasis on the interaction and being able for example to have so one of the big lessons for us is how do we balance between having it open and having accessible and being able to have all these, you know, you don't, you don't have the walls of a room limiting you a number, but we do want people to interact. So if you have a session of 200 people, you don't really get any interaction opportunity. So we've been really kind of struggling with that and I think it's all of these questions there's no right answer is just these questions where, again for us, you just have to go back to think what is our top priority what is our top objective and recognizing that your top priority and objective of a certain meeting in person might be different, and you might have to reconsider. When we were expecting to meet in person this is what the top purpose and the top things that we wanted to get out of it, but now going virtual. You might have to shift. And you have to kind of think about designing that based on your priority is it just you just want everyone to be in the room and see each other and get to like, you know, it's your team. And you haven't had a chance to and you just want to then play games because you just want people to interact and get to like feel familiar with each other or is it a knowledge sharing and you just want to make a presentation so you want to put the money behind a good recording, a good translation, and people to be able to take it home so that that kind of kind of revisiting the the the objectives there, which I think was a big thing for us going from an in person CBA to online. Another top point is the communications. And again, what Matt mentioned earlier people absorb information very different ways, and something that we have found really difficult is trying to get to the communication to such a variety of people. You really have to like, communicate, communicate, clarify as much as possible as much as possible, really have very clear like this is how you do this, this is how you do that. And also be prepared for people don't read their emails I think we've all been there where we get the emails with all the instructions and we say I'll deal with it later and then you show up on the day. And actually, it's all right there, but you know last minute you're like where's this where's that how do I find this and it's so that that's always a struggle as an organizer. I think you still have to make all that information available but you have to be prepared for people are still going to ask you everything all the way to the last minute. But communications is is really important and making clear making your messages clear and then just repeating them and putting them here and putting them there and putting them in different, in different ways and maybe even having them written by somebody else because if I write the message on how to do something I'm always going to write it in the same way so having somebody else that thinks a bit differently, and thinks of instructions in a different way. The fact that going online is just as much just as much effort as something in person, and more possibly even more costly I think a lot of people I think everyone by now has probably gotten used to it but last year. A lot of people were like oh it's online it's it's easy it's free it doesn't cost anything we're not. We're not hiring a venue we're not buying food for everyone, but actually, when planning be prepared that you're going to need a lot a lot of staff time. And that's not always that's not very, very cheap everybody's time is really valuable and don't underestimate how much time and how many people it requires and I think all of us have learned how running one zoom meeting you need more than one or two people. And so I think it's it's people underestimating and and getting us to explain to the donors, because all of us are in the same sector. That's been one of the challenges also to be able to explain to the sources of money. Actually, this, this takes a lot of work and a lot of time, even though we save cost savings on other ends and on carbon and travel. We're kind of having to spend a lot of time in in just managing everything. As much as you can if you're really in touch with your and I think in this in this group of people in this community, your audience listening to the audience when you're planning listening to what they're looking for and what they're expecting. And when we did the transition to go virtual, we sent out a survey to all the CBA mailing list and we have a really amazing community formed by a lot of you who are very responsive and everyone responded to let us know what they were expecting to respond. If we went virtual what would be like kind of the top priorities. So, keeping that communication to again touch base on where are we going because you don't have that like direct interaction with people that you can sense where people are at. And I think Olivia also talked about this when they started getting feedback from the experiences they realized how they would change things to the next one. And again, I think by now this idea of testing really it relates to the communications it relates to like, make sure everything's really clear and test everything. Try everything beforehand. Do yourself like go through the process before it goes live. Imagine yourself having to go ask friends, hey, can you go try this can you make sure this Google Doc actually works. Yeah, it requires a lot a lot of testing I think a main thing. Again, it we're becoming the new normal but before we were all so used to in person events we all were really good at improvising because our level of basic knowledge was already we could manage a room we could facilitate we could say, I have to do a session great let's do. But now it doesn't mean the same skills that we all had for in person don't just easily translate to an online context. You have to revisit and you have to realize. Okay, maybe the same things that I used to improvise in person don't actually apply so it really does. And kind of, I think for the ego, it has been an interesting process for a lot of people that felt like expert facilitators and organizers and all of a sudden then realizing. Oh, wait, actually. So I think, yeah, that's been an interesting process for all of us organizers as well and facilitators. Yes, I mean just to pick up on your point on testing. I cannot be emphasized enough. You know that there are there are so many things that can go wrong and do go wrong. If you're not fully prepared. Then then there's really no, there's really no excuse you've got you've got to sort of, you've got to take out anything. You've got to get everything in line as much as possible so you can deal with all those unexpected events and make sure you're ready for those. Even if you are fully prepared, things will happen. So imagine if you're not fully prepared. Yes, exactly. Yeah, you have to, you have to assume something will always happen, which is why the fully prepared part is even more. I mean, as a quick glimpse behind the scenes, we could give some insight into the opening session of CBA where our main moderator, who was IIDs Clare Shaker, was violently ill on the morning of the event and actually only joined us a minute before we were due to start. And she was sort of in charge of moderating the entire session. So there was a lot of panic. Okay, who stands in what are we going to do and so on. So, you know, you could only do that if everything else is mapped out and you know what's happening you can only deal with those sorts of things. Right, so we're going to go into a brief Q&A now. So do ask questions, type in the chat box or raise your hand and we'll and speak. I can go back to Dan's question from a while ago to kick things off. So Dan asked about subtitling and whether this was sort of in response to the videos that we showed earlier on and whether it was something we were doing internally for changing specialists. It's largely internally is the answer. We do have a couple of tricks that we use. We separately we produce, we've got a new podcast called Make Change Happen, which sort of looks at lots of things. And then we get those fully transcribed and we do actually employ a specialist to do those. And we would do for really key, long pieces of text, I imagine. But for shorter videos, we do them ourselves basically. A tip in case you're unaware of this is you can upload a video to YouTube and it will automatically generate captions that are sort of 70 to 80% accurate. So a quick way of doing it is to do that, even if you're not going to actually put the video on YouTube to put it into YouTube, generate the captions that way tidy them up in YouTube and then download them and use them elsewhere as you want. I mean, even that though that there is a challenge. So, you know, it's a great service but as we've seen over the last couple of years, you know, tech companies have algorithms that are biased towards white global north voices and so on. So YouTube easily recognises my voice and so on. It has a lot of difficulty with others. So in those instances, we have to do those manually. So we tend, as I say, we tend if it's sort of up to four or five minutes we'll do it. But it's a huge resource train, you know, you just simply can't do it for everything. So yeah, I hope that answers the question. I wanted to mention a contribution from a Linda who's who's in the meeting but isn't English isn't her natural language so she's been using the sort of translated to contribute in text. She didn't join one of the breakout groups but she wanted to mention that during the pandemic, it was the online events were really useful to continue to actually continue the work as a civil society organisation and to communicate with donors. She felt that using these online platforms actually brought their organisation and then closer to the donors and international partners, because they didn't need to wait, sort of, you know, a year to have monitoring and partner meetings, and so on. So, so they found that that was really useful in order to be able to approach donors and partners outside Mozambique where she's based. So the biggest challenge as an organisation which works with the rural community in particular has been, you know, using these platforms to use to work with those communities so this is, you know, the digital divide and technology issues. We know they have no control over the use of technologies. And when they carry out online events they feel that they are totally excluding those communities who are actually their target group. That's something she also mentions the issue of language, how their events have been in Portuguese community speaks the local language. And many times when they actually get the technology then they still can't engage because it's difficult to get in somewhere in the Portuguese language in the local language at the same time. So that's some of the challenges. No, it's going to answer to Dan's second question. If we just take it in turns. Dan asked, would you then, I think it was in reference to the chair of a session being sick last minute and potentially not showing up. I would then recommend to have a backup moderator in case of the opening session. Yeah, I think this goes to the, the, the, the, the planning of the session so because of this thing that sessions actually online sessions take quite a big group. And then really kind of for the CBA sessions. All the, we have a bunch of material and templates that the session organizer has to fulfill test to fill in. And that has all the different people that they're working with and their contact info, then doing a test run, which is them actually meeting beforehand and planning between I'll be chairing you'll be speaking then there will be the other speaker. So and so we'll do this in that process. Everyone gets to know the plan so that you do have in a way a built in somewhat backup because I think getting a backup plan B for every person that might fail at some point. If you nodding would be pretty difficult. Obviously, if you're in a VIP level. I'm sure, I'm sure that is possible and that should happen. But I think it's this thing of if you have a team. And this is why we are, I don't know if anyone's been involved in any of the session organizers I know Sikib has. It's really like harassing and harassing the session hosts to like really get these documents filled out and meet and have a test run to test the technology, and also discuss because if someone goes, then someone can step in and knows more or less. Who are the people in the room, what the introductions were going to be what the plan was so yeah. That's a great. Yeah, another really obvious reason of why to have these test runs. Comment from Sikib from ICAD, hi Sikib hope you're well. I haven't seen you for a bit. The, he points out that many tech companies don't have local servers in developed countries which is obviously a good point. You know, some of the applications, digital platforms that they've been invited to contribute to or join, you know, just don't work in the same way in the global south keeps based in Bangladesh. Yeah, this is absolutely right. We recently did some a big study of sort of digital working here ID that I was involved with. And part of that involved talking to a lot of our partners, particularly those in the global south and one thing that about all these kinds of issues and one that came out strongly from from that was that the organizations didn't feel they were ever properly asked what worked best for them. You know, this is the power dynamic that global north organizations, whether you know NGOs charities or donors and those kinds of things are, are, you know, forcing organizations less powerful partner organizations to comply with what they want to do rather than asking them you know what works for you what's easiest for you. How, you know, how can you have control of the data that's generated as part of this. So, you know, we're sort of working on looking at sort of increasingly open source tools. So to allow organizations to have that that greater control over the data and the systems, but then open source often does mean, you know, a little bit more technical know how more resources involved. That kind of thing so there's really stuff to balance all the time. But at the same time, you know, if you're not even asking these organizations, you know these key partners of the what their preferences are then you know, you need to sort of address that I would suggest. Message from Amy. I'm going to answer what the future events looks like pandemic. I was thinking it was a question to the participants. Yes, and I think that's a great question we have lots of thoughts. But yeah, we, this is actually we really, really want to know this as CBA organizers. The future, just for the recording what does the future of events look like post pandemic. Stan, I saw you put a question so maybe I'll pick on you to answer that and then hopefully others will join the floor. Oh, that's a hard question, to be honest. I was just thinking, I don't know. I really don't know I can imagine that. In my organization we just have a new office. And we are thinking about placing some video screens in the meeting rooms. So some people can work from home join the meetings and so I was saying maybe some hybrid style events where you invite some of the participants live and some of them online. I don't know. And I also think that requires some extra thorough thinking because like you said Teresa online meeting is not the same as a real life meeting but then a hybrid meeting will probably also be a bit. Well, that will include some more challenges. So maybe maybe in that kind of way I don't know. I don't have the answer for you. Sorry. No, it's an open conversation. Amy is actually our expert resident, the event organizer of CBA and previous CBAs. So Amy you've had a lot of learning of having to pick up a lot of set of new skills as you have gone from like in person to virtual and I think you've already started probably working on kind of the hybrid, or at least thinking about that I'm sure. Absolutely. Yeah, yes indeed. I've actually run a couple of hybrid meetings last year. And Dan I think you're absolutely right there's definitely a completely new set of skills that you need there and you need to kind of understand the physical things that are needed as well as the online and technical so you really have to kind of marry those two together. But I think it can work if it's done well. Has anyone in this group attended or been to a hybrid event? The key is also what we mean by hybrid in terms of, you know, so you can you can run an event and you can live stream it from a camera at the back of the room, and so on but it's that really hybrid. What what chances are the people who aren't there have to engage you know but in my experience those types of things are just dominated by whoever's in the room. And so on so it's about it's about the level of interaction engagement that you can offer and between those in the room and those who are who are outside. The most is the most difficult aspect of it all. I think that's certainly what we're we're experiencing. There's one principle that I've seen that going to go on what Dan was saying in terms of you know the sort of video screen up in a room and you have people in the room and then people that is that sort of approaching it from the idea that if one person is remote, everyone is remote. Because the dynamics are such that if there are four people in the room, and one person, you know, on a call or whatever those four people can have an individual conversations amongst themselves and exclude that person. So it's sort of addressing it, you know, but getting that mindset right I think. Just to comment on that Matt I think that that's totally I agree with that because I've been the the virtual participant in a hybrid event, not the physical on myself but again from the group of us that were attending virtually. It just felt like you know in a plenary when they're having a big sort of discussion, there's a few speakers sitting on a stage. Then it kind of works because you know you can maybe set up the screen so that each speaker gets a little bit of time, and it's also on the screen there live as well as on the screen for us and zoom but when they're doing the break out when they're doing the sort of round table, it where we're just watching and there's very little interaction that you know even if there's a facilitator they're so say for lack of a better word consumed with the people in the round table that they kind of forget that there are virtual people sitting on a laptop right next to the screen. So he's you know working with with people with flip charts and post it and just every now and then forgets to sort of check the chat box. So it does seem like we're sort of observing you know if that was the sort of role that we had it worked out fine but in terms of being an engaging workshop participant it's really really difficult and I think that's that's kind of one of the mindsets that people need to sort of again pick up skills on if you're if you're going to be doing that sort of hybrid event as a facilitator that's something that I think quite a lot of people will be needing to be skilled up on. And I think the principle of sort of if there's even a few people that are virtual than everybody should be treated virtually. I think that works out and again that I've heard of events where even though people are there physically they're encouraged to maybe join in on a chat on their phone so that everybody can put their comments up. They're talking about people who can raise their hand and they get a microphone and they get to say something. Everybody's treated the same you all in the chat box and the facilitator treats even a virtual participant writing in the chat box as well as someone physically in the room. So maybe maybe just sort of expanding that kind of facilities to everybody that might be something that we have to build up on. Yeah, I completely agree in terms of the that you know have separate having separate conversations going on and then as Teresa was saying you know that the facilitators got to be skilled enough. Or there's going to be enough resources there to be able to monitor you know the different things happening in different places and bring it all together. We're coming to the end now. I think that is all we have time for. I wanted to say one really final point that that hasn't been raised but is a sort of little burning issue of mine is sort of come up a couple of times when people have talked about less travel or you know sort of repurposing travel budgets, and you know saving on carbon emissions. I like to highlight that you know just of course flights and so on as a massive producer of carbon emissions, but digital working isn't carbon neutral. So there is there is a, you know, the data that is being generated the video calls, and so on that that is a big emitter of carbon and carbon is being generated. So it is something to bear in mind sort of be wary of saying oh yes you know we've we've got rid of all travel and we've gone digital so so that is that that's it we're sorted, as it were. Yeah, so on that final point I really want to thank you for your time, if your questions your comments and all the sharing experience your generosity there. That's been really great. Thanks also to Teresa, who helped. Thanks. And yes Pippa do do get in touch separately that we'd welcome that. One final thing is in the bottom right of your of the chat box there are three dots. So you feel free to click on that and then you can save the chat so the resources that we've been putting in the chat box throughout the session you can save and look at at a later date should you wish. Dan. Yes, we can certainly look at how to to to make the hybrid meetings engaging for rope participants next year will have even more lessons, and so on. We were going to finish with a with a final poll, but in the interest of time, we're going to forgo that. It is very good practice to finish with a survey, and so on and I'm sure you've seen a lot of that at CBA in this conference. Good moment to plug in please fill out the CBA survey at the end of the conference. Exactly. So yes, you know we, we're always my organizer hat is always on. We're always looking to improve things and we can only do that if we know what you think. So yes, keep an eye out for that that'll be in the sort of follow up emails that get sent out and thanks so much for your time. See you soon.