SUMMARY ✎
Don’t mimic face-to-face meetings! SDS has drafted a a series of design guidelines to rethink online collaboration based on their experience and come up with an entirely different structure for organising distant meetings
With online meetings, we often make the mistake of just copying what we usually do in face-to-face meetings. But instead, we should look at what online meetings are best suited for and for which face-to-face meetings are not!
Another important distinction to make is the one between confinement with digital cognitive saturation, social distancing fatigue, general anxiety, and what we can learn from that period, its evolving practices that we can take back as good practice for after the confinement period.
These 2 considerations draw 2 simple axes:
- « in-person collaboration strengths » versus « digital collaboration strengths»
- « confinement practices » versus « post-confinement practices »
Many more dimensions could be taken into consideration: big/small groups; good/bad connection; do/think activities; etc. However, for these, a large variety of tutorials and tips can already be found on the Web. Here, we’ll focus on the 2 above-mentioned and less developed axes, in order to re-design online meeting/workshop practices…
The « digital collaboration strengths » tend to be on the opposite side of the « in-person collaboration strengths »: what is easy and spontaneous to do in one seems difficult and tiring in the other, and vice versa.
Don’t mimic face-to-face meetings!. The key message is to design a different type of online collaboration, instead of trying to mimic face-to-face meetings approaches. You’ll find a series of design guidelines showcasing the main polarisation points between in-person and online collaboration processes.
They are not just tips to improve online meetings, but rather an invitation to rethink online collaboration, more in-depth and coming up with an entirely different structure for organising meetings.
For more details on these design guidelines see here
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