I do think it was a good idea to put everyone back-to-back for slots though

a) Making people pre-agree to a smallish window works, but that gets harder for a larger one
b) Provides a built-in cue for ending the call, and short chats are the point of #VirtualCoffeebreak

Okay, practical notes for if you want to host your own #VirtualCoffeebreak:

In the linked spreadsheet from the signup form, I made a column to annotate for eh, omg, and unmarked, then used sort A-Z to group rows by that

10. It was surprising not to see as many linguists as I vaguely "expected" (I guess because about half the conferences I go to are linguistics conferences so I create this biased sample?)

So this is an extra encouragement to linguists to sign up for #VirtualCoffeebreak!

9. It was really cool to meet people in the UK/Europe since I'm more likely to go to conferences in North America!

Definitely want to keep rotating these through different timezones since international travel is going to be so hard for the next while

#VirtualCoffeebreak

8. On the host side (I hope other people host these!), it's important for the host to have a good experience or they won't want to host a #VirtualCoffeebreak again

So doing a filter before random selection to identify definite nopes and definite yesses helps with this factor

7. On the guest side, I think it's important to preserve some degree of random selection, because I don't want "not getting selected" to make people feel "oh no my topic was bad and I should feel bad"

There were genuinely more good topics than I had slots!!
#VirtualCoffeebreak

6. But, understandably, people I already chat with sometimes weren't super keen on entering a lottery just to chat with me

So in future, I think I'll run it more like semi-random system, where I reserve the right to hand-select a few and draw the rest
#VirtualCoffeeBreak

5. Picking randomly out of conversation topics that met a minimum barrier of interestingness was a great way to catapult myself into interesting conversations with new people, and I'd definitely do that process again for that experience

#VirtualCoffeeBreak

4. Having a bunch of short conversations with new people was really exciting and energizing, exactly as I'd hoped

But one of the other fun parts of a conference is re-seeing the people that you see maybe once a year or know via the internet

#VirtualCoffeebreak

I'm trying a new incarnation of #VirtualCoffeebreak - #VirtualPubNight!

Small/med affinity-ish groups of people on a particular theme, like the group you grab for dinner at a conference

This time: linguists, Friday night

Sign up:
https://forms.gle/9mHiuxidYV28wHGn7

it #VirtualCoffeebreak so I can find these tweets again!

Things I've learned:

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#virtualoffice #virtualcoffeebreak #hybridworking #remotework #teams #encryptedchat #employees #technology #saas