I think moderated video calls are my favorite format, as boring as that is. I.e. you have a speaker and also a moderator who picks people to ask questions, cuts people off or prompts them to keep talking depending on their judgment, etc.
Another thing I like, if it seems like people are interested in talking about multiple different things after the main talk / QA / discussion, is splitting up the discussion into multiple rooms by topic. I think Discord is a good application for this. Zoom is pretty bad at this but can be cajoled into having the right functionality if you make everyone a co-host, I think Microsoft Teams is fine but other people have problems, and other people think GatherTown is fine but I have problems.
I think moderated video calls are my favorite format, as boring as that is. I.e. you have a speaker and also a moderator who picks people to ask questions, cuts people off or prompts them to keep talking depending on their judgment, etc.
Another thing I like, if it seems like people are interested in talking about multiple different things after the main talk / QA / discussion, is splitting up the discussion into multiple rooms by topic. I think Discord is a good application for this. Zoom is pretty bad at this but can be cajoled into having the right functionality if you make everyone a co-host, I think Microsoft Teams is fine but other people have problems, and other people think GatherTown is fine but I have problems.