Zoom is video conferencing software that is affordable, highly functional and most importantly has a robust API that ensures that using the platform does not result us being locked into a proprietary platform.
Here are the core functionalities of the platform which make it a good choice for World Café style deliberations: - Up to 500 participants - Breakout Tables - Simple recording of gatherings - Ability to integrate with democratic software - No Vendor lock-in
# Zoom Café Methodology
Here we describe how to create a DIEM Café style meeting in Zoom.
- Moderator creates a meeting (Gathering) - Invitations sent to up to 500 participants - Participants join ( all one one screen / room) - Moderator (+/- panel) makes presentation - Moderator invites people to breakout sessions - Participants click on breakout button - Participants enter rooms of up to 6 people - Each room is assigned a Table host - Short discussion (say 10 minutes) - Selected participant records short summary - Participants exit room returning to gathering
This can then be repeated several times. Ideally the session ends with everyone being shown an instant collage of the breakout table discussions.
# No Vendor lock-in
Zoom is a proprietary, but it is a safe choice for use at the moment as we have full programatic and manual control of the content and environment. This means that we can safely programme our needs for democratic software based on the API and switch to a pure web standards approach as the need arises.
There appears to be an HTML5 web standards based interface with some limited functionality (not tested):
# Zoom API
More importantly is that there is a robust, extensive and well documented API.
In particular this means that we can do things such as create our own algorithms for allocating people to breakout tables (for instance we can use demographics or create language specific tables), we can also automatically download video recorded from breakout tables and therefore allow them to be edited together for immediate feedback or later postproduction.