Do you know how Discord compares to other options for group calls? I'd been planning to have the London meetup today on Google Hangouts on the basis of not needing people to download something (I think).
(Though downloading something is probably less of an issue if this is going on for months.)
Off the top of my head, relevant considerations for comparing options:
I'm not sure how to weight these. I'm also not sure how much it really matters; it may be a case of "just pick something decently good".
I've been looking into ways of staying in touch with people while in quarantine, in particular Skype, Discord, Slack and now recently also Jitsi. Personally I have to unfortunately keep using all because of confusing Venn diagrams and people who are not tech savvy, but if you have the option to choose I recommend Discord over all the alternatives:
Yes, the bullet point list is for Discord. I only tried Jitsi for an hour or two, but the quality of the call was horrible and the session crashed when a second person joined (so really I could just see my own face, pixellated). When I tried to download the Ubuntu client I got dpkg errors and a failed installation. Maybe Jitsi is actually great(?), but I'm not very tempted to try again without outside help.
I think there's a huge advantage towards having a general channel that can be used to communicate at all times of the day and not only when the formal meetup happens.
It's infrastructure that can be valuable long after the initial organized meetups.
Yeah. We do have a Facebook group and slack channel for this, and the slack channel is barely used. But I could believe it would be valuable if it was used (it offers different affordances than Facebook, which is why we bothered to set it up). Discord is similar to that, and would be more likely to get used if it was also used for the meetups.
Hangouts worked fine today, but we're leaning towards trying discord for next time.
I’m sure no one here remains unaware of the fact that we’re in the midst of a pandemic. My goal with this post is to help meetup organizers help their communities deal with this situation. I know that some communities have already preemptively canceled events, and that others live in areas that have already been hit hard enough that this message is too little, too late. I hope that those of you in the latter situation are staying safe.
When should we stop having meetups?
I recommend that you stop holding meetups immediately, regardless of your location. It’s abundantly clear that containment measures have failed, so even if your city isn’t currently in crisis, it’s unlikely that that will remain the case for long. At this point, we should be aiming to “flatten the curve” – that is, to slow the spread of the disease so that hospitals don’t have to operate above capacity for long periods. If we can achieve this, a greater proportion of ill people will have access to professional medical care, which will reduce mortality rates.
This popular article makes a good case for acting now.
If you are adamant about waiting to suspend your meetups (maybe you live somewhere remote and sparsely populated with excellent testing protocol… but probably not), this spreadsheet provides a crude mathematical model to calculate risks from holding gatherings, based on the confirmed COVID-19 cases (or deaths) in your area and the size of your gathering. I encourage you to reach out to me directly if you are thinking of continuing to hold events going forward; it’s my impression that this is currently just a bad idea, but I'm open to talking one-on-one about your particular situation.
What can I do for my community?
How can I help my community prepare for COVID-19?
Not holding events is a good first step, of course. For more on what to do, I suggest bit.ly/covid-preparedness. This is a document about how to prepare for a COVID-19 pandemic, and while I am not a domain expert, the document is open-source and provides citations, which means you can assess the evidence for yourself and suggest corrections if you think anything is wrong.
Here is a bulleted list of priority interventions:
How can I keep my community connected when we can’t meet in person?
I’ve created a Discord server so that you can keep the conversation going even when you can’t meet in person! We can create separate channels for each different group, and it should be easy to have voice or video calls over Discord at your normal group meeting time. (I’m a Discord noob, but I think it should be possible to make channels private as well.) Regular meetup organizers will be made admins, and I’ll be available to help set things up if you have questions.
This is the invite link to the server: https://discord.gg/hfyRcfk. You can send it out to everyone in your meetup group (it’s set to not expire). And please let me know if you’d like to help moderate the server!
Additional resources
There are thousands of COVID-19 resources floating around out there, and at this point it’s really hard to orient to all of them. The LessWrong team has created a database where they are attempting to aggregate all of these resources and present them in a comprehensible, user-friendly way.
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns, and please try to stay safe!