Hosting Meetings Like a Pro - Deep Dive 🤿

Jamie from Ludi

Jamie from Ludi

One of our Founders, Jamie, takes a deep dive into all the features and controls you can use as a meeting host to facilitate great sessions.

Enabling Meeting Mode

Using Super Lock

Meeting Host Controls in detail

Ping Arrow (Tab Key) and Vanishing Pen

Pulling participants around the board

Spotlight and hats

Follow other people

Frames

Exporting your board

Force Reveal

Time Machine

Set Starting Position

Workshop gadgets

TL;DW Summary

Chapters

00:00

Starting a Ludi Meeting

Understand the initial setup and features when you start a meeting.

01:26

Super Lock Controls

Learn how to manage object locking for hosts and participants.

02:28

Host Controls Menu

Explore host controls for managing tools, timer, privacy, polls, and activities.

06:12

Navigation & Engagement Tools

Guide participants with pointers, pen, and pulling.

08:18

Spotlight

Highlight participant notes and votes.

09:01

Wear Hat

Choose from a range of hats to lighten the mood.

09:19

Follow someone

How to follow other people.

09:38

Frames

Use Frames to organize your boards, hide content, and guide participants.

10:14

Export & Data Management

Learn to export board data and manage participant contributions.

11:23

Force Reveal

Use Force Reveal to reveal hidden stickies.

11:58

Advanced Board Features

Recover content with Time Machine, and option to Set Starting Position.

13:17

Interactive Workshop Gadgets

Add fun and structure with various interactive tools.

14:38

Meeting Host Recap

A quick summary of all the powerful hosting features.

Transcript

00:00

Hi there.

00:01

In this video, I'm going to show you how to host a meeting in Ludi using the meeting host controls and all of the other features that not just bring people together, but keep the meeting moving efficiently.

00:12

so you've created your board, you've set up your layout, you've invited your participants, they're joining the board.

00:18

The next thing you need to do is to click Start meeting.

00:21

This does a couple of things.

00:22

Number one, it asks you do you want to lock the layout to prevent any accidental mistakes?

00:28

Click yes almost every time.

00:30

Number two, it makes you the meeting host and gives you access to a set of meeting host controls up here, which we'll go through in a second and also gives you access to controlling the super lock settings, which we will also go through.

00:42

The second or third thing it does, I've lost count now, is change the left toolbar.

00:49

So before you had a meeting on, the tools were around building a board, building layouts, designing activities, and here it changes to collaboration tools.

00:57

So things like sticky notes, topic groupings, tokens, joining stickies together with arrows, voting, reactions, drawing, and some of the fun collaboration tools.

01:10

The last thing it does is it turns on the private writing mode by default.

01:15

This hides everyone's stickies and they can write in private until they're ready to share.

01:21

They then use, this control down here to reveal their stickies when they're ready to.

01:26

So the first thing we'll look at is the super lock controls.

01:30

If you remember earlier when I started the meeting, the tool prompted me to lock the layout.

01:37

So when I start the meeting, everything that is locked is not editable for both myself and my participants.

01:44

With the super lock settings, you can change this.

01:46

and so super lock on for everyone means that no one can unlock any locked objects.

01:52

If it's on for participants, that means I, as the host, can unlock locked objects, but they cannot.

01:57

And if it's off completely, that means anyone on the board can select objects, unlock them and move them around or edit, delete them.

02:09

So the super lock setting starts in everyone.

02:12

So for everybody, if you need to make changes to the board as the host, it's useful to switch it to the middle setting.

02:19

This means everyone else can't select Locked objects, but you can, and you can make changes.

02:25

Okay, I'm going to set that back to everyone.

02:29

So next we have the meeting host controls.

02:32

There's a number of things here and we'll go through them one by one.

02:34

Number one, you can change the tools that your participants get.

02:38

The left toolbar.

02:40

So you can turn on and off tools as you like, whether to help people collaborate or maybe to give them focus.

02:46

You might want to just give them a couple of the tools here.

02:50

Let's enable these.

02:52

And you can see here, we've just enabled the sticky notes and task cards.

02:59

Okay, so I've reset the tools to the default.

03:02

And, just remember that you, as the host, have access to all of the tools by clicking the blue toggle.

03:07

You can access all of them here, whereas your participants access the default ones that you make available to them in the session number two.

03:15

Manage hosts.

03:15

So you can add co hosts, anyone that is currently on the board, you can add them as a co host and they could also access the meeting controls and do all the same things as you can.

03:26

you can have a meeting running and have no one as the host, which means everyone is the host.

03:31

And you can do that by removing yourself and applying the changes.

03:35

I'm not going to do that for now, so we'll just skip out of that.

03:39

Thirdly, private writing, as I said, when you start a meeting, this is turned on by default.

03:44

It's a really good option, to be honest.

03:47

Most team collaboration sessions, but there are times you might want to switch it off.

03:51

So if you look down here, you can see that private writing is on.

03:55

You can see my colleague's notes.

03:57

I can't read them.

03:58

And I can see my notes have a, red icon at the top that means that other people can't read them.

04:06

If I turn this off, it means all sticky notes are visible to everybody and there's no private writing.

04:11

You can see the widget has disappeared.

04:12

at the bottom, a, meeting timer that kind of does what it says on the tin.

04:20

You can set time and have that countdown.

04:29

Hide identities is anonymous mode.

04:32

This, from the moment that you click it, makes everyone and everything that they do anonymous, so it cannot be tied back to their user.

04:40

You can still see people moving around the board, and they'll look like these little guys with bags on their heads.

04:46

You'll notice that the participant list doesn't list people anymore.

04:50

It's so while you're in anonymous mode, or while Hide identities is on any sticky notes that are created, any votes that are made, things like that cannot be tied back to anyone when you switch it off.

05:02

The things that were previously made anonymous stay anonymous.

05:05

But now you're back into normal mode.

05:07

If someone makes a sticky note, it's tied to their user.

05:11

The ready check is a really nice little, control that instead of asking everyone, are you done yet?

05:19

Are you finished?

05:20

Or asking people to indicate when they're done.

05:23

Turn this on and come up here.

05:24

And they can click unready.

05:27

This shows this, totals up your participants and shows who's ready and who's not ready and who you're waiting for.

05:37

you can run polls, so you can run quick polls with three different formats.

05:42

A single choice, a multiple choice, and a number scale.

05:46

just to show you what they look like quickly.

05:48

You can ask a question, provide the responses.

05:51

You can have a multiple choice option, or you can have a number scale.

05:55

So a question with the prompts from 0 to 10.

06:00

And lastly, the end meeting button ends the meeting state on the board, so it resets the board back to default.

06:07

There's no more hosts and participants.

06:08

The left toolbar changes.

06:10

Private writing is turned off.

06:12

Okay, so aside from those controls at the top, there's a couple of other things that I want to show you that are really useful for managing a session.

06:19

Moving people around the board, moving them through different activities, pointing at things, just making sure people don't get lost or know what they're supposed to be doing next.

06:28

so the next thing I want to show you is the ping tool, which drops an arrow anywhere you want, and the, temporary pen.

06:37

So the ping tool is activated either with just the tab key.

06:41

So anywhere that your mouse is or you've clicked, you can drop an arrow and it disappears after about five seconds, but everyone on the board sees it.

06:49

and you can also, if you hold it, you can create an area to highlight.

06:54

So you can say, we'll work on these, Then we'll discuss these items.

06:57

Then we'll discuss these items.

07:00

It's a really nice way to, just point at stuff.

07:04

And if anyone is away from the arrow at the time that it's dropped, they can go and click it and it will bring them back to that point.

07:15

The accompanying tool is the vanishing pen, which you can find in the gestures tool.

07:22

And, the vanishing pen draws with your color, which you can set in your preferences up here.

07:29

And again, it disappears after about five seconds.

07:31

So again, it's a really nice way to, point at stuff to do arrows, do an overlay without affecting the content underneath.

07:44

And on the topic of pulling people to places, as the host, you have access to a control from your avatar called everyone.

07:52

To me, it's got a little sheep icon because you're herding everyone to the right place.

07:55

When you click this, it brings everybody on the board.

07:59

They don't need to do anything, but it will force them to come to your viewpoint and, zoom level.

08:05

So exactly what you're looking at, they will be pulled across and out or in to that point.

08:11

So if you're zoomed in really far on one section and you click it, everyone will be pulled to that area while you're in here.

08:20

While we're in here, I should say there's two other functions that will be really useful to you as a facilitator.

08:25

Number one is the spotlight.

08:27

Using the spotlight, you can see which member of the team either created content or where they voted, and you can switch between your team members.

08:36

So I can see Stephen Whitfield created these sticky notes, Steve Mosley created these ones.

08:41

And it's a really useful way to see that this shows just for you.

08:45

So if you turn this on, other people won't see it.

08:47

if you screen share, they'll see this on your screen share.

08:51

but if you're talking, say one by one, and you want to see all of one person's notes, it's a really easy way to go through that.

08:58

Other people can, of course, spotlight their own content or spotlight other people's content.

09:03

there is also the option to wear a hat.

09:07

So if you want a fun little session, pop a hat on your avatar, ask everybody to pop a hat on theirs, and you'll see them moving around the board with the fun little avatars there.

09:19

and the last function that other people can choose to do is to follow other people.

09:25

So you can ask your team to click on your picture up here and click on follow.

09:31

And everywhere you go on the board, at whatever zoom level you are, their camera will follow yours until they choose to stop.

09:38

So If you have multiple activities on your board, it can be useful to wrap them in frames.

09:44

Frames are made from the Zones and Frames tool and you'd be wrapping them in an activity frame.

09:50

And what this does is it gives you two things as a facilitator.

09:54

Number one, you can hide activities until they're ready.

09:57

So if you've got more than one thing you want to do, you can make the first activity visible and hide the later ones.

10:04

And there is also a sheep icon here and it focuses everyone to this frame.

10:08

So you click that button brings everyone into this activity.

10:14

So there's quite a few options for, helping navigate the session, moving people around, keeping it efficient.

10:19

But then when you come to the end of the session, sometimes or most of the time, you don't want to just leave your board data in the tool.

10:28

You'll want to get it out, get it into another tool, either to share the information, to document it, or to, keep track of, say, the team's actions or outcomes.

10:37

There's a number of ways you can do this.

10:38

I won't go through all of them here, but you can export your board to data formats, including CSV, JSON, table, markdown.

10:48

You can export a PDF of the entire board that gets emailed to you.

10:52

or you can integrate with JIRA and send sticky notes as actions, stories, bugs, tasks, whatever issue types you like, so you can track them there.

11:04

The other thing you can do is just simply copy and paste sticky notes.

11:08

So if you drag and select sticky notes, you can copy and paste them and they will paste into text tools, with line breaks between each sticky.

11:20

It's quite in a nice simple format.

11:24

One thing I forgot, as your team are going through the session and they're revealing sticky notes, sometimes someone might not be available, or they've forgotten to reveal their sticky notes.

11:36

As the host, you can right click on a sticky note and you've got a force reveal function.

11:41

So this allows you to force reveal the sticky notes that people forgot to reveal.

11:51

only the host can do this and other participants can't.

11:58

when you're working in Ludi, obviously it's collaborative.

12:01

Changes are made.

12:02

If anyone makes a mistake at any point, they can undo their own changes.

12:06

But you can also go up here into the board menu and open the time machine.

12:13

Now, the time machine shows you every action that occurred on the board in a linear sequence.

12:18

So here you can see me building up the board, moving things around, changing some things there.

12:24

if I skip through, you can see the board changing.

12:28

One of the key things that you get with this is that you can actually select content and you can copy it and paste it into your original board.

12:37

So if someone did delete something or something was missing from earlier in the session, it's never actually lost.

12:43

You can go and retrieve it and then paste it back in.

12:46

So if I paste here, you can see those two sticky notes appear.

12:50

I've got two last advanced tips for you.

12:54

Number one, if you're, if you have a long workshop or you want people to start in a certain position on the board, move your camera to that position, open the board menu and click on Set starting position.

13:10

When people arrive in the board for the first time, this is the exact view that they will see.

13:15

So that's quite nice for setting context.

13:17

And, lastly, to add a bit of verve to your sessions, take a look at the workshop gadgets.

13:26

In here, you've got a jukebox, which is a music player.

13:29

You've got a counter.

13:30

This counts.

13:31

So you can keep score.

13:32

If you're playing team games or mention how many times someone says bugs.

13:37

there is a voter element that allows you to control what's being asked and people can vote on that.

13:43

So you can do it on mood, on ranks, on team members, on responsibilities, and you can customize it to whatever you want.

13:50

There's a timer that you can drag onto the board instead of using the board timer.

13:53

That's quite nice because you can put one next to each activity.

13:58

There's a spinner.

13:59

So the spinner does what you expect.

14:03

You can click it to spin and it finds a winner.

14:07

You can change this with any entries that you like or you can use the quick sets.

14:11

And it's got a team member option here where you can apply to your team members that are on the board or in the team.

14:21

Lastly, for sound effects or for a bit of fun, there's a buzzer.

14:26

The buzzer has a set of sounds that you can configure and some fun options on here that I'll let you take a look at.

14:38

Okay, so that was running a meeting as a host in Ludi.

14:45

Let's just quickly recap start a meeting.

14:48

When you're on a board, it makes you the host, changes the left toolbar for everybody else.

14:52

It enables private writing.

14:54

You get access to the controls here.

14:56

There are, functions in your avatar to pull everyone around.

15:00

You can spotlight content.

15:02

The ping tool is amazing for pointing at things.

15:05

That's the tab key.

15:07

You've got a vanishing pen.

15:08

You can use frame controls to hide content and pull people around.

15:13

You can export your board.

15:14

Nothing is ever lost.

15:15

If you go into the time machine, you can set a starting position for people on the board.

15:20

And the workshop gadgets add an element of fun, and interest to your session.

15:25

Okay, so that's that for this video.

15:27

See you in the next one.