How to bring your meeting, service, or group online.

Zooming ahead!

Okay so the first thing I did when I brought my meeting online was create a zoom meeting. This was the primary point of contact. It was a place for people to rally. This worked great and within only a few days we were hitting numbers that indicated full attendance. We even have people in attendance that surpasses our usual numbers because people can join from outside the area. The Internet is the neighborhood where everyone lives. The Internet is the hood I grew up in.

Speaking of growing up in the Internet I knew some things. I knew that it was an invitation to the world. I knew that it was a matter of time until there were going to be porn spammings, meeting bombings, and general harassment. I also knew that there were less technically savvy people in my community. I knew that my group is centered around sensitive information. The problem that I was stuck with was how to provide a place for people to connect that was wide open enough that the least technically savvy person could get in, but that a well formed and scripted bot could not. Or if a bot or otherwise delinquent party did get involved how to mitigate the effects as quickly as possible. This brings us to Zoom Settings. Lucky for me there was a recommendation from the top of my organization to put in place. Some I adhered to and some I did not. Here is the how and why’s below.

Zoom.us -> Settings -> Recording
- Local Recording -> Off
- Cloud Recording -> Off
- Automatic Recording -> Off
Zoom.us -> Settings -> Meeting
- Host Video -> Off
- Participants Video -> Off
- Join Before Host -> On
- Require Encryption for Third Party Endpoints -> On
- Chat -> On
  - Prevent participants from saving Chat -> Off
- Private Chat -> On
- Auto saving Chats -> Off
- Play Sound when participants join or leave
- File Transfer -> Off
- Feedback to Zoom -> Off
- Disable desktop/screen Sharing for users -> Off
- Remote Control -> Off

Okay so a lot of these are obvious as to why you would choose them. Recordings are turned off because of the sensitive nature of the content. Host/participant video is off because that camera is a doorway into peoples houses. I left this off so people who weren’t prepared for it wouldn’t get blind sided by inviting 100+ people into their home. Of course things like file transfer, remote control, and screen sharing to a otherwise public space on the Internet is almost certainly going to lead to either intended or unintended trouble. Best to put rails in place for these things and stop people from shooting themselves in the foot.

Prevent participants from saving chat was not turned on. Here is why, enabling this feature stops users from being able to copy and paste. No copy and paste, no saving right? The other problem is that you cannot copy and paste URLs. Since everything has been moved online there are additional resources that have been moved online. Docs, Sheets, and things of that nature tend to have complex sharing URLs because of their unique identifiers and retyping them is at least laborious and at most nearly impossible for someone struggling to use a computer in the first place. It’s a small price to pay for being able to click a link.

Okay so, Zoom solved the where portion of the problem. It was quick and easy to distribute and it’s pretty user friendly. The problem quickly became though that I was the single host. Which means that I had to attend every meeting each time. Meetings couldn’t go on without me, and meetings occurred every day. You need someone to play “whac-a-mic” (muting everyone except who should be talking) in a meeting space of 100+ plus people. You also need someone prepared to eject any users that are solely there to create disruptions i.e. spammers or bots. So this brings me to my next problem…

g-g-g-gggggggggggg SUITE

Distributing administrative rights. Since my group is in the 100+ people range getting volunteers isn’t the problem. People are happy to help. The hard parts are two things:

1) Getting people who are qualified for the task. For me the guiding rules were:
– Solid Internet connection at home: You can’t do it remote or at work. If your host drops it leads to other issues that I’ll discuss later.
– Access to a desktop/laptop: You can’t perform host duties from a cellphone or tablet at this scale as far as I’m concerned. Maybe some people could do it with an iPad, but I drew a hard line in the sand.
– Comfortable with the zoom interface: Basically during the time spent with the group you end up fielding a series of private messages, performing administrative tasks such as muting people and reminding people of some of the rules of the meeting, then also communicating with the person who is running the meeting for the rest of the group.

2) I needed a way to provide the above qualified volunteers with access to be able to host but not give them full rights to the account. After all, the account was registered to my email and had my credit card attached to it. I didn’t want to give people one of my own passwords or potentially lose control of the host account on zoom. So what to do?

My solution might have been seen as overkill, and I admit that there are easier ways to solve the distributed admin problem. I’ll present two solutions.

First is what I actually did. What I realized is that I needed to divorce the zoom account from my personal accounts. This is mostly because I didn’t want to be circulating my personal information and secondly because the meeting itself needs to own it’s own resources. As a consequence what I ultimately ended up doing is buying a domain name from domains.google.com and immediately setup a g suite account as well. This allowed me to create accounts for different roles.

I created an admin account to insulate control over the resource for as long as I was in charge of coordinating technical solutions. This means that if all else fails I have the power to reset, delete, etc anything that needs to tended to.

Then I created a host alias for the admin account in g suite. The alias cost nothing because it’s not seen as another user in g suite. I then updated the zoom account to use the host email address instead of my own. The host zoom login and the admin accounts have separate passwords so I could circulate the host login to zoom to the people who would help me run the meeting, but they would have limited access to what they could touch.

Getting the domain and g suite also allowed me to setup another email address that could be used for my groups venmo. Thank god, because otherwise this would be another space where it’s tied to someone’s personal account. Instead now it can be tied to the groups account and when transition in roles occur no one has to do a weird hand off of personal information.

In addition using g suite allows you to setup a central location for some resources such as docs, sheets, anything else you group might benefit from in a single location.

Zoom also offers the ability to create a host pin. Host pin allows a user to claim host once logged in with their own personal account. I haven’t fully implemented this method. Here is why, when a host is disconnected for any reason Zoom’s application automatically assigns the host role to another user. It does this randomly. Which means that if your host loses Internet connection (which has happened) then host is assigned randomly to one of the 100+ people that have come from duh, duh, duh. The Internet. After that point claiming host also becomes impossible as the option in the interface goes a way (smh). So what to do? This is why I gave the people that I trust the username/password to the account. Worst case scenario they log out of their personal zoom account and login to the host account to join the meeting. In this case the who is host is uncontested and my person is back in charge. This is a frustrating downside of Zoom. Since my meeting went live though there have been a fair amount of security changes and I haven’t looked yet to see if they have addressed this.

Okay, so I said this is all overkill and there is a simpler solution too right? Right. So the other work around is just to create a gmail address. This gives you a little less room for movement but it’s free, where as to setup the domain and g suite you’re out about $30. So your call. You can setup an email that is something like “myorganization@gmail.com”. Setup zoom to use that email for your host, but make sure the zoom and the gmail account have separate passwords. This way if someone goes bonkers and hijacks the zoom account you can do the password reset on the account which gets sent to your gmail account. Voila you’re back in control. If your meeting is private an not public I also recommend using the pin because to some level you have trust in most people showing up to your meeting.

Take it a bit.ly at a time

Okay so now you have regular meetings up online. You have a distribution of administrative rights so you can have a day off and not worry about being a single point of failure. Everything after that is truly sugar on top. This brings me to using bit.ly.

A bit.ly account is free for up to 1000 links. I just went ahead and registered one with admin@myorginization.com account from above. This is handy for our group because things like meeting format, host sign ups, chair sign ups, etc are all stored in our g suite docs. It’s pretty easy to copy and paste the links, but it is nice to have a short hand for people to be able to memorize. In steps bit.ly. With bit.ly I can create links to important documents like bit.ly/MyOrganizationMeetingFormat and that’s something users can memorize worst case scenario vs a google docs link which is much more complex. The only note that I have here about bit.ly is to remember that domains are not case sensitive, but everything after the slash is not. So bit.ly/MyOriginizationMeetingFormat and bit.ly/myorginizationmeetingformat are not the same. I recommend creating both the easy to read Pascal format for people to memorize it simply, and the lowercase for when they try to recall the information. You can read more here: https://support.bitly.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021057871-Are-Bitly-links-case-sensitive-

Okay that’s all for now. If you have any questions about the setup I implemented feel free to reach out to me at k@sincerelyk.us

Cheers!

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