Virtual Liberating Structures: Impromptu Networking 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 Impromptu Networking in Gather Town:

Pair up on a chess field

I created a chess field in the Gather Town "builder", a browser-based map editor. If creating a chess field with 2x2, 4x4, 6x6, 8x8... tiles, you will have an even number of tiles. Only one avatar can stand on one tile, this means you create an even number of chess-field-tiles to create pairs.

In Gather Town 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 chess field the "private conversations" are limited to two tiles, so people can pair up by stepping on the chess field with their avatars.

Looking at the image below you see a blue pool southeast of the chess field. 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 pair-ups.

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).

I now created private areas to always pair two tiles. See the image below: there is a 6x6 area with the private conversations 201 to 216 (for 36 people to pair up) and the outer rows (a little darker) with the private conversations 217 to 232 (for 64 people to pair up).

Participants stepping on the chess field are instantly connected to one other tile in a private conversation. Via the broadcast from a spotlight a facilitator can interrupt to give instructions or ask to step on a different tile to be connected with an other avatar.

Thats all... Impromptu Networking 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: 1,2,4,all (& fishbowl) in Gather.Town and Virtual Liberating Structures: TroikaConsulting (& coaching dojo) in Gather.Town