Get to Know the People on Your Virtual Events Better
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COVID-19 made us rethink the ways we used to organize meetings and events. By moving them online, we made events more inclusive and accessible to a larger segment of the population. Unfortunately, that also made them indistinguishable from one another. It took much of their identity away. With that, many of the reasons people visited events for — random encounters, networking, exchanging contacts also got washed out.
Ironic as it sounds, once everything turned into one never-ending stream, it became more convenient to keep it running in the background rather than reach out to others. We are missing the networking opportunities that physical events used to offer.
Rather than being another online conferencing competitor, Networkd has a single, complementary goal — let event-goers securely exchange contact details with like-minded individuals. Then it fades away. That’s correct — Networkd is so focused on privacy that even user accounts are temporary by default (unless one opts-in to keep theirs saved). Everything, from the event spaces to user accounts, disappears within 24 hours of its creation.
What remains (hopefully, for good) are the contacts you exchanged with others. Those are kept safe in your email inbox so that you can stay in touch with others long after the event.
I am happy to have contributed to developing the technical side of this project. I also want to encourage anyone planning a virtual meeting of any size to give it a try.
Originally published at https://preslav.me on April 21, 2021.
