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Meeting Facilitator

 


Visakha Orators, India.  Club President and Agora Ambassador Koka Prasad, leading a meeting.
Visakha Orators, India. Club President and Agora Ambassador Koka Prasad, leading a meeting.

The Meeting Facilitator is the person that is in charge of making sure that the venue is properly prepared and - if you're on-premises that are not yours - that it is properly cleaned up afterward. Of course, he may ask for help in this.

The Meeting Facilitator should arrive well in advance of the scheduled starting time of the meeting. He or she should:

  • Prepares the venue - tables, chairs, lectern, location of club and Agora symbols/banners, signs, posters, etc.
  • Prepares the tools that the Timer will use to measure and signal the time (stopwatch, "traffic" lights colored cardboard, etc.)
  • Ensures that there's proper air conditioning or circulation in the room (opening the windows, etc.)
  • Ensures that the agenda for the meeting is printed and that there are enough agendas for the members
  • Ensures that there are enough feedback forms and pens.
  • If applicable, check that the lighting, sound system, and projection equipment work properly.
  • If the club has recording or photography equipment, set it up and prepare it for recording. Also, if there is a projector or other A/V equipment, it should be connected and tested.

Usually, the Meeting Facilitator is also the one that opens and closes the meeting.

An opening statement could be something like

"Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the meeting of the Silent Towns Agora Speakers Club, the first Agora Speakers Club on Mars. I want to give the floor to our Meeting Leader of the day, Mr. Walter Gripp. Please help me welcome him with a warm round of applause."

After the introduction and during the applause, wait on stage till the Meeting Leader comes, shake his hand, and retreat. The floor is now his.

A closing statement could be something like:

"Thank you for coming to our meeting. The meeting is now closed, and I invite you all to stay for some beers at the nearby Martian Bar."

 

Some clubs like to use a gavel for signaling the opening and closing of the meeting.
Gavel

Specifics for online meetings

For online meetings, the Meeting Facilitator is in charge of all the details to ensure that the meeting actually happens and people can access it. These include:

  • Scheduling the meeting on the platform that the club uses and creating and distributing the link for the next meeting.
  • Ensure that the online meeting is up and running no later than 10 minutes before the scheduled starting time.
  • Accepting people into the meeting if there's a "Waiting room" functionality or similar.
  • Ensuring that the Meeting Leader has hosting privileges during the meeting.
  • Handling privately or publicly any technical issues or questions that arise during the meeting, such as (for example) a participant not knowing how to share its screen.
  • Working with the members that have technical issues in a breakout room or separate meeting to help fix the issues (note that the meeting facilitator is not expected to provide technical support, but merely an off-meeting partner with which to fix an equipment issue without disturbing the main room)
  • If the club records its meeting, then - recording the meeting, copying the recording to its permanent location (e.g., dropbox, a website, youtube, etc.), and sharing the link as per the club's policies.
  • Taking all necessary measures to prevent the disruption of the meeting, such as muting all attendees that should not be speaking during a specific activity, disable their ability to turn it back on, disable meeting functionalities such as the chat, screen sharing, shared whiteboards or annotations, and warning or removing from the meeting attendees that are behaving unorderly.

Please note that the Meeting Facilitator is not in charge of providing all the infrastructure required for the above - he's merely a user of an existing platform. Providing and configuring the platform initially is a shared task for all the club members, especially the most tech-savvy ones. For example, if the club decides to use Zoom, then the club officers should create and configure the Zoom account and manage the access credentials, while the task of the meeting facilitator would merely be logging into the platform and setting up the meeting.

 


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Page last modified on Friday November 5, 2021 17:29:44 CET by agora.