So far we have two different kinds of meetings that differ from the “normal” meetings I blogged about. Our church once a month has special Fast and Testimony meetings, where members are encouraged to fast and pray for 24 hours on the first Sunday of a month and come to church to share their testimonies of the Gospel. We also twice a year have Stake Conferences where members from different congregations in the area get together for a larger meeting. I’m adding notes about them here in a separate post in the hope that they are useful to someone else.

Fast and Testimony meetings

These meetings are unusual in that any one attending has the opportunity to speak. In an in-person meeting, when an attendee wants to speak they would go up on the stand and wait their turn. In an online Zoom meeting, the one time this has been done so far the attendees would just unmute their mics and cameras and speak. There may be some need for someone presiding in the meeting to help determine who should go first, but the one meeting we have done so far it went pretty well.

The exception to that was background noise. I’ve found that even though I set the Zoom meeting options to have each attendee join muted, some connections are still joining unmuted. And in that first meeting there was some background disruption due to that. So there may need to be a moderator who watches the attendee list (called participants in Zoom) and actively mutes when someone is not talking.

A variation on this which we haven’t tried yet would be to have some people present in the chapel of the church building and some people remote. While that configuration was fine for our “normal” weekly meeting, it becomes a challenge if someone in the chapel wants to speak and we need to let remote participants know. Or if someone online wants to speak, then the in-person attendees need a cue to know the remote person is next. Additionally, if a remote person is speaking, do we need to set up a screen so that people in the chapel can see them, or is just having the remote audio shared enough? And someone would have to shut off microphones (either remote or in chapel can be enabled, but both would cause feedback), which would require some very involved moderation.

All virtual is much easier to manage. At work, we have often followed the ‘if anyone is remote, everyone is remote’ model. When you want the attendees in a meeting to feel equal and more willing to talk and participate, then if everyone has the same level of connection, whether phone only or video conference or in a conference room, it helps everyone to feel connected.

Stake Conference

Stake Conference is still being worked out, but should be pretty simple. Rather than broadcasting from our chapel, the plan is to have a broadcast to all the buildings in the stake (area) and to allow attendees to call in to the broadcasting site directly.

Our church has a church wide broadcasting site which we plan to use, so no Zoom or Teams. Unfortunately, on our test session today I took my openSUSE laptop and found that whatever codec is being used that my open-source laptop didn’t have it installed.

So the intended setup is that one building has the speakers and is broadcasting. The attendees will be able to watch from home through the broadcasting site, or we will also have the broadcast played in each building in the area, and that is where my part comes in.

For the receiving building setup, we will need:

• Internet access. For this setup, the network admin is turning on the ethernet port on the side of the podium.
• A (Windows) laptop
• Ethernet cable (CAT 5)
• Projector
• Screen
• 1/8th inch audio jack to RCA jack (left and right) cable

One snag to figure out is how to get the projector out. The projector is locked in a cabinet which is in the library and I don’t have a key. I have my own projector, but I haven’t used it in a while and need to check that it still works. Also note that I realized my projector is getting old and only has VGA and DVI inputs, but all my Windows laptops only do HDMI output.