Virtual Liberating Structures: 1,2,4,all (& fishbowl) in Gather.Town

In times of the pandemic 2020 and 2021 we learned to create amazing human interactions in virtual spaces. If you don't know liberating structures yet, take a look at: https://www.liberatingstructures.com

It is a challenge to make these structures somehow work in virtual environments. Gather Town is a great tool to create virtual spaces for human interactions. This is why I will show how to create a map for 1, 2, 4, All in Gather Town:

coffee table (pair), picnic table (small group), fishbowl (plenum)

In Gather Town single tiles of the map can be defined as "private conversations" - participants of private conversations can only see and hear the persons/avatars in the same private conversation. On this map the "private conversations" are limited to two tiles at the coffee tables on the bottom and to six tiles at the picnic tables in the middle, so people can pair up at the coffee tables and pairs can meet at the picnic tables.

Looking at the images you see a blue pool. This area is created to have fishbowl and sharing sessions. The "megaphones" are spotlight-positions: Avatars stepping on these tiles can broadcast to the whole map. This way you can

• give instructions to participants in private conversations to eg. remind of time-boxing and ask for new grouping.
• have representatives of the groups sharing their takeaways from the group discussions to all the audience on the map.

Here is an image of the map-layout for up to 60 people: 30 coffee tables for pairing, 8 picnic tables for up to 6 participants (more small groups can just meet in clusters all over the map), the fishbowl-pool with four spotlight positions to broadcast to the whole map:

Let's take a look at the map-editor of Gather Town: After creating a map (first adding walls and floors, second adding some objects like chairs and trees) you enter the module "tile effects". In May 2021 there are five tile effects available: Impassible (red), Spawn (green), Portal (blue), Private Area (purple), Spotlight (yellow).

The coffee tables are marked as impassible tiles, the two chairs at one table belong to the same privat conversation. Same with the picnic tables, only difference: Its six tiles belonging to one private conversation.

The four broadcast-positions in the blue pool are marked as spotlight tiles (and the chairs around the blue pool are just decoration).

Thats all... 1,2,4,all goes virtual!

Please comment if you try it and let me learn from your experiences.

Alex

PS: If you liked this article, you might also like Virtual Liberating Structures: Impromptu Networking in Gather.Town and Virtual Liberating Structures: TroikaConsulting (& coaching dojo) in Gather.Town