Virtual Liberating Structures: TroikaConsulting (& coaching dojo) 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 Troika Consulting in Gather Town:

Three persons in a private conversation

I created an additional map for Troika Consulting. In Gather Town you can connect rooms (breakouts, sub-rooms) via portals. In the down right corner of the image you can see a teleporter to enter and exit this room from the main space.

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.

In this map you find five tables with three seats each. These three seats belong to five separated private conversations. If you place your avatar on one of the seats, your video-conference will be limited to the three participants at this table:

In the middle of the map you find a megaphone tile: The "megaphone" is a spotlight-position: Avatars stepping on these tile can broadcast to the whole map. This way you can give instructions to participants in the private conversations.

Let's take a look at the map-editor of Gather Town: After creating a map (first upload a background image, second adding some objects like chairs and tables) 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 tables and water around the island are marked as impassible, the chairs are marked as private conversations number one to five.

creating a background image

In this case I did not use the Gather Town editor to create the background as it is pretty limited (but good enough for a start). I downloaded the program "tiled", a program for game-level design.

With this program you can create maps for Gather Town... but you will need a template of tiles (on the right side in the image). I found this tile-set by a web search - I am really sorry, I don't know the url anymore to give credits to the provider.

Thats all... Troika consulting goes virtual! (...and of course you can use this setup for the classic coaching dojos you know from the agile coach camps!)

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: Impromptu Networking in Gather.Town