Along with the rest of the conference, the Awards Ceremony moved online. A few of my colleagues received awards, so I wanted to attend. One of the things I found really interesting was the technology.
The organization used a program/web app called Remo. I was not excited about the virtual experience, but found it to work very well. It was easy to move around the ballroom and turning on the mic and/or camera made you live with your table mates. Being live made you part of the conversation and that sort of broke the ice for me.
The chat window was pretty active throughout the presentation. Remo could do a little better by making most or recently used emojis stay at the top of the emoji pop-up. I would also have liked to ‘like’ other people’s chats and be able to tag them in one of my chats.
One of my table mates brought out the whiteboard, so we all tried that out. Networking in this way was not on my to do list, but I found it enjoyable, especially when I got to chat with people across the country and who I only see at SLA conferences.
Of course, the award recipients were all eloquent and really deserved their awards.
I am a little confused about why SLA is using more than one platform, but I imagine there is a good reason.
All-in-all I found the technology to be a bonus and easy with which to familiarize myself.