Take your meetups online
We have been organising Flutter meetups with Flutter Ahmedabad for one year now. Everything was going good until coronavirus started to spread like Wildfire. Governments advised citizens against gathering in theatres, offices, schools naturally meetup. All the big meetup groups in nearby cities were cancelling events. Long before all this, we had scheduled a physical meet up on March 15th 2020. Speakers for this event notified and topics were selected. RSVPs for this meet were opened up and then we were facing the cancellation of this meetup.
Influenced by HumpDayQnA we decided to go for a video conference based meetup. Actually we wanted to do an online meetup for the past year but were not sure if attendees would show up. In the face of the pandemic, this was the chance to do it.
What did we do
TLDR; we ended up doing a video conference meeting using Google Hangouts Meet and also stream it live to youtube using Xsplit Broadcaster.
Long version, read along. Because we were influenced by zoom we wanted to use it. As it turns out zoom will only allow you to host meetings 45 minutes long after that it will disconnect.
Another tool, Google Hangouts. but the free public version will allow you to have only 25 participants unless you have a g Suite account. Luckily, a member had his school account with G-Suite subscription. Using this account he can have meeting with up to 100 participants simultaneously. We decided to go with it
To go live on Youtube we could choose from a number of apps. OBS and Xsplit are popular and battle-tested ones. There are many others too. Look here. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2907883?hl=en
So now choose one from each list and follow along.
Meeting tools
- Zoom
- Hangouts meet
- Airmeet (new but interesting)
- Skype
- Any other meeting tool
Live Streaming tool (full list)
- Open Broadcaster Software
- Stage Ten
- Streamlabs OBS
- XSplit Broadcaster
- Wirecast
We chose Hangouts Meet and Xsplit Broadcaster (OBS is fantastic but mysteriously it does not work on my laptop)
Create a new meeting
Go to https://meet.google.com/ and create a new meeting
When created you can copy the link “https://meet.google.com/xxx-yyyy-zzz”
This is your hangouts link and Anyone with this link can request to join the meeting.
We posted this link in our meetup description and announced that we were going online for the meet.
You can send this link to your potential attendees. And, don't worry no one can spam your meet because every time someone want to join they have to request and the meeting creator have to allow them.
That's all about taking your meetups online.
Promotion: Check out the meetup page of Flutter Ahmedabad and join the group to get notification about the upcoming online meet.
[optional] Go live on Youtube
Follow the official Xsplit Broadcast User manual to setup youtube live stream of your hangouts meet window
Also, Check out our youtube stream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTJUu8wdd4k
Join #HumpDayQnA every Wednesday to ask your burning flutter Questions and meet awesome people around the world.
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