Mindful Engagement Online with Rocco Haro of Kickback Space
With the rise of virtual meeting spaces, calendars can quickly become filled between work, community, and personal events. With a number of different platforms like Zoom and Google Meets, fatigue is at an all-time high, with most people feeling like they’re not being heard or simply tuning out of the meetings altogether.
On this episode of Talk About Your Community, Todd Nilson of Clocktower Advisors is joined by Rocco Haro, Founder of Kickback Space Inc. With plenty of experience in the meeting space, Rocco will share his past his experience of running a happy hour, gauging breakout rooms and swapping participants. Discussion will center around fostering relationships to connect in more mindful and authentic ways.
About Rocco
Computer Scientist turned Event Technology Geek, you can find him at the link below!
Show Notes
1:53: Rocco starts with his why, stating that he has been naturally curious since childhood. The pandemic spurred his inspiration for Kickback Space. He was hosting happy hours in Zoom and realized how much effort it was taking to create meaningful conversation, swapping people in and out of breakout rooms.
8:58: Todd speaks to the unnatural state of facing so many people eye-to-eye at once on video calls, and the fatigue it creates. They also touch on how to make meetings more equitable. In terms of participation, it is common for people to feel left out while others dominate the conversation in virtual meetings. Rocco mentions even using gamification, where a life bar can dictate the amount of time left for any individual to speak.
20:07: Taking a question from a listener, Todd and Rocco move onto the spectrum of virtual reality (VR) implementations. We already participate regularly in non-immersive VR in applications like Zoom or Google Meet, but there is also semi-immersive and fully-immersive VR. One benefit of non-immersive VR is that the video function still allows users to see some nonverbal communication. However with fully-immersive VR, there is still a technology gap that needs to address motion sickness, lagging, and cartoon avatars not showing micro-expressions.
29:06: Going back to his time spent swapping people around in groups while monitoring participation in meetings, Rocco goes a bit more in-depth on Kickback Space attempting to address the problems and fill some of those technology gaps in the VR world.
