Hybrid Events

[rashfael]

[This is a draft and will be expanded]

Although physical events are possible again, some people prefer to attend events online. In the future, venueless will support these hybrid events and provide engaging tools to both in-person and virtual attendees.

For virtual attendees, nothing much will change, so I'll focus on changes we are thinking about to better support in-person attendees.

Differentiating in-person and virtual attendees

First we need to tell virtual and in-person attendees appart, to offer them a tailored experience.
One possibility could be to just ask them in the onboarding phase.
Oftentimes events will have different ticket types for physical and virtual attendance, and this information could be encoded in the registration token.
Of course, attendees should always be able to switch this mode, probably in their preferences and by device.

Streams

If you attend an event physically, a lot of the time you are actually sitting in on a talk or workshop and won't need a video stream. This does not mean that in-person attendees will never want to watch a stream, they might do so in their hotel room for example. For in-person attendees streams will be disabled by default (to avoid having to quickly stop a stream each time a room is entered) and (on mobile) the space for the stream will be minimized.

In-Person virtual interactions

Physical attendees will want to engage will almost all other features of venueless, be it chat, q+a, polls or schedule, so we probably won't disable anything but certain media for in-person attendees.

Rooms

Venueless rooms now may correspond to physical rooms and might have a locations. This will mostly impact schedule and exhibition.

The virtual / in-person divide

We should be concerned with a divide between in-person attendees interacting with each other and virtual attendees, which can not participate in hallway talk. Physical attendees always have to initiate contact with virtual attendees by going online, the inverse is not possible (virtual users can not interact with the real-world event).

Displaying virtual engagement in the physical locations

We already have widgets for chat/polls/qa to integrate into obs and others, so showing the virtual chat on the real stage is no problem.

Technical Problems

For a good mobile experience we probably need push notifications, since in-person attendees won't have the website open all the time. Since Apple refuses to support the Web Push API, we can either not support Apple devices at all, or we'd need to release native apps on iOS (per event, which is a lot of hassle).

[Snooz82]

Great.

That just brought you a Hybrid event.
:-)