For obvious reasons all upcoming physical meetings and evening technical talks have been cancelled. However, we were very lucky that Peter Debney from Arups was willing to still deliver his planned talk on 2 April 2020, but virtually. He was able to host the event using his own software, GotoWebinar.
Had this been a traditional, physical, meeting we would have expected a turn out of about 30 people to listen to “Tension Structures: Past, Present and Future”. As it was, the virtual meeting had over 400 people register, and 266 people attend on the night. The attendees were not just from our region but were from all over the UK and the world (including Ireland, France, Spain, India, Canada, USA, Romania, Dubai, Hungary, Italy and Nigeria).
Our next three meetings (May to July) have already been pencilled in as virtual meetings and we just need to update the website as some of these will be changes to the topics originally scheduled. We also still need to decide how these are going to be delivered, as we will obviously not have access to Arups GotoWebinar licence.
We are now thinking how we can continue, once all this is over, to deliver the friendly, local, social, physical meetings that our members enjoy, but also to reach the wider audience via the online format.