Hi Alwin,
I planned one interactive hybrid event (that was moved fully online a day before the event because of COVID exposure of the whole facilitation team, but that's a different story). In our planning we had a strong discipline to only include things that everyone could do, i.e. no paper post-its in the room, but rather access to online whiteboards (in our case jamboards) for everyone.
In our minds we set this up as a large zoom call where some people were in a room together - instead of setting it up as a face-to-face meeting where some people called in.
We had booked a room 3 times the size we would normally use and would have had small groups huddled around laptops for breakout groups. I was surprised how decent the noise cancelling was, so small groups could actually have a conversation, with, e.g. three people huddling in the room and three people on the zoom screen, each typing on the same jamboard.
The aspect of this that took the most choreography and practice was switching from large room audio (with hand held microphones and room speakers projecting sound) to small group audio (room audio off, laptop audio on). Also, we had one of our facilitators to be online, while the other was in the room.
One big insight from planning and nearly executing this: You need far more tech support than in a face-to-face or online only meeting. And practice transitions until you are like a well organized ballet.?
All the best,
Eva
