Post ZOOM Open Mic night summary: Last night's open mic on the ZOOM platform worked awesome! Being able to see and talk to each other in real-time was a true joy and made for a much better experience for everyone, including and especially the host, me! The sound quality was on part with FB Live, meaning if you've got your signal tweaked well enough for FB Live it will work with ZOOM. Here are some takeaways:
1.) ZOOM is very intuitive - easy to use for all including hosting. While being a very powerful program for meetings it's also quite intuitive with easy to see and understand buttons that allow you to turn on and off your audio and video. You can use cool custom backgrounds which is a neat and fun feature. Check out the Live FB stream below to see some. And speaking of that...
2.) Streamed to FB Live - I was able to stream the entire open mic to FB Live at the same time. So those that can't or don't want to do ZOOM can still watch the open mic here on the AGF OMG FB page.
3.) AGF OMG member involvement - this was an important discussion from both a participation and viewing standpoint. We have well over 130 members but we typically have same 5-6 performers and maybe 10-12 watchers (including performers). We are wondering how to get more people involved in participation? Is it a matter of day or time of day? Please respond below if you would like to perform or watch but need to do so on a different day. Please let me know what it would take to get YOU to perform or at least come and watch a future open mic. Feel free to private message me your thoughts if you prefer.
4.) AGF OMG FB page private vs. public - we discussed at length at the end (another great feature of ZOOM) the merits taking the AGF OMG FB group public or leaving it private. The only reason for taking it public is so people can share the streamed live performance with friends and family but it was pointed out that some might prefer for their performances to remain private to just our group, a valid point. Also, throwing open the doors to the group by making it public (even with Admin approval to join required) means opening the door to possibly nefarious intentions. Group to remain private.
5.) Live streaming individual ZOOM performances - this is possible and it is enabled but each person that is performing will need to initiate their (and only theirs) live performance before they begin and then turn it off when they finish which takes a few minutes to do. While I understand why people want to share their performances with their friends and family on FB it would likely be easier to just perform solo Live FB shows for your friends privately so as to best keep the flow of our ZOOM open mics going smoothly.
6.) Other ZOOM-like platforms - both Facebook and Google have recently enabled live ZOOM-like features. We will look into those just to see how they work but since most are likely to be variations on a theme we plan to stick with ZOOM for now so as at the very least save our members and participants from new-app fatigue by constantly having to learn new programs. That said, if we find something is that much better or easier than ZOOM then we'll consider a changeover then.
That's about it off the top of my head. Please comment below with any thoughts about anything above, especially number 3 - AGF OMG member involvement. I'm very interested to hear why you signed up for this group but do not perform or attend/watch. Feel free to private message me your thoughts on this as well. Thanks!
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