Zoom vs. Live Meetings: The Big Up Side

Gainesville, Florida mayor Lauren Poe tweets (above a retweet from Andrew Yang on "9 Reasons Zoom is Not Our Friend"):

I find Zoom useful for 1-1 or small group meetings that are purely informational or when discrete decisions must be made. It is terrible when creativity is important or when collaborative decisions must be made (e.g. governing, strategic planning). https://t.co/lnEXPGkpEu

— Lauren Masks Save Lives Poe (@laurenbpoe) April 11, 2021

I feel his pain. Yes, Zoom is a giant pain in the ass for 1) large bodies 2) making lots of decisions.

Last year, Zoom played a large role for me in two related activities.

One was serving on the Libertarian Party's platform committee, with more than 20 members, working through numerous proposals. We did that through a combination of Zoom meetings and email discussion/balloting.

The other was the Libertarian Party's national convention, which was an absolute technological nightmare despite several people doing heroic work to make it functional, and not just because of the mutiny against the party conducted by a delegate minority at the physical meeting portion of the convention.

But there's one huge up side to Zoom (and similar "online meeting" products), and that's the cost savings involved for groups made up of people scattered over wide geographic areas.

If the platform committee had had a physical meeting, 20-odd people would have been expected to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on travel and lodging, and to spend at least two or three days away from their homes and their "real" jobs, in order to meet for 8-16 hours.

For the national convention, expand those costs to more than a thousand delegates (of which several hundred invested that time and those expenses because they chose to, not because it was required).

Does Zoom suck? For large meetings with complex agendas, yes.

But there's a cost-benefit calculation to be made.

In the case of the platform committee, several members offered to make triple or even quadruple digit contributions to the party if we decided to not meet physically (I was one of them), and followed through on those pledges.

The party made money instead of spending money (on meeting room rental, etc.).

The committee got its work done for, almost certainly, tens of thousands of dollars less in personal expenses incurred by its members.

Yes, the meetings were more difficult and less pleasant on Zoom than in person. But I think they were also worth it.

Hopefully Zoom and other "online meeting" software will continue to improve in functionality, and hopefully thousands of organizations and their members will save millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses that can be used on things other than flying back and forth across the US to drink bad coffee and sleep in strange beds.