Arvin Kamberi Head of Online Meetings, Diplo; Vice-President, Bitcoin Association of Serbia
One year of the ‘new normal’ First published on Diplo Blog, 24 March Looking back on 2020 is a bit different from our usual annual perspectives. Communication and work over the internet have taken a completely new meaning in the past 12 months. Prior to the global pandemic, we would have had a hard time explaining what MS Teams or Zoom are used for, and now these two companies combine for 25% of all things done online. We would send emails and reminders about the possibility to ask questions online or be involved in the discussion. Today, almost half of the employees already have a home corner with the best light and the most stable internet as part of the home-office layout. This is why we at Conf Tech consider March as the starting point for a new online meeting paradigm, and mark it as the completion of a full circle. I will try to avoid listing all of the online events we had during this period, since it will not do much to describe the type of help we were asked for, or the importance of things we noticed to be the primary concern for the future. (In retrospective, Diplo’s Conf Tech held more than 60 online events and conferences in an 11-month period, from February to December 2020, with more than 6200 participants inside our online conferencing rooms! Instead, I will try to focus on new things we have learned and share the project focus and developments. What did online event organisers need help with? When we look at the type of requests we received and processed, the most common one was the help in organising online events and conferences from scratch. This can be considered a normal first step when asking for help. Many organisations and companies did not have any procedure or basic knowledge on how to conduct online meetings – starting from announcing/promoting the event on the website to the follow-up email after the event. This was particularly noticeable for diplomatic missions with the limited personnel and smaller NGOs battling to stay updated with Geneva’s vivid international scene. In the beginning, we helped conceptualise, set in place, and deliver several events moved online due to the pandemic, which needed to quickly adapt to an online format. We noticed one thing that stood out: everyone was convinced this was a short break in ‘business as usual’. Not many organisations were interested in building capacity around this part of online work. Anyhow, we realised that even when the global pandemic is over, the new way of meetings will become the standard norm of modern business communication. Therefore, our particular effort was placed on doing what Diplo does best: tailor an online course for practitioners and help build a new organisational capacity within the missions and NGOs.
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