How Do I Host/Chair a meeting

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Your Service is vital to the ongoing success of our meetings. Please take the time to read the instructions sent on how to chair a meeting, and perhaps sign in and practice in advance, especially for your first few meetings. Please read the resources on how to handle disruptions and perhaps practice this in advance so as to protect the participants in the meeting. 

Finding balance in our primary purpose while also protecting the community we serve is an ongoing priority and challenge. Our latest resource, Handling Online Meeting Disruptions in the Moment, is meant to help you keep going if your meeting gets "Zoombombed." While it is true that we cannot simultaneously be accessible to an unknown combination of anonymous people and also completely safe from internet trolls, we can help our members add tools to the toolkit, a practice we are all familiar with. We have done what we can to distill best practices for Personal Anonymity, Default Settings, and Managing Meeting Participants in Zoom, which is all quite new to most of us, and share them with you. 

Please take some time to rehearse using these resources and set up some practice meetings. Note: it is strongly suggested that each meeting elect a group admin, or co-host, to manage the participants, allowing the meeting secretary to run the meeting. A few of the protocols offered here, set up in advance and practiced a few times, can keep these disruptions from derailing your meeting entirely.