August 2020

Recently I was asked about why I started building VideoFacilitator so I wanted to share that story here.

VideoFacilitator was born through a sense of frustration with what the existing tools out there. To be honest I wasn't even going to build it, I wasn't quite sure if it was just me, or if other people felt the same frustration. Through repeated conversations however it seems like many of my peers in the Australian Agile community had the similar experiences and felt it would be valuable to solve this problem of making multiroom video conferences  more natural and easier to run

As and Agile Coach in my alternate career, I spend a lot of time facilitating workshops and events and quite often these will include remote facilitation. Because many Australian organisations are promoting healthly work life balance and flexible working arrangements you can almost guarantee no matter when you run a workshop, someone isn't going to be in the office and will need to dial in.

Unfortunately, these types of events often require a significant amount of prep work and if there is anything I hate to do, its to over prepare for a workshop. I much rather the ability to do just enough prep work, and then to be able to adjust the workshop on the fly based on what is actually happening during the event.

To make digital events successful, you'd end up creating a plethora of video conferenece rooms before an event so that you can save all the links, "just in case you needed them".
You would then have to stick them all in a slide deck somewhere, where you would have to force people the deck as a proxy navigation tool, where users could click through to their rooms at the appropriate times.

But what happened if you'd realised you hadn't preped something that you needed? Well it was too late now. There was no possibily of recovery during the event because it was too hard to setup new rooms, send out new links, and adjust the information about what was happening in the room. When you found out you didn't have enough rooms or had forgotten to add something to the deck of links.... well lets just hope that never happened...

The worst was trying to manage time, because it was so hard to keep track of time you'd need to say things like "at 1:15pm eveyrone needs to come back to the main room so we can start the next session". Invariably not everyone would come back and you'd then have the uncomfortable waiting period, holding your breath hoping that eveyrone would come back...

"Had they missed that it was now 1:15pm and that it was time to return?", "Were your instructions clear enough?", "Were they ever coming back?"

Fear and dispare with no possibility of easy recovery... even if it was fleeting, it was always a horrible feeling and experience.

So what are we doing? VideoFacilitator is being built so you won't need to feel this again in the future.

There is still so much more to do, but I really hope you will join us and help us change the world of co-creation!

Peter Lee

Founder