The Case of the Vanishing Café Participants Challenges from a virtual Knowledge Café

I recently ran a Knowledge Café as part of an online academic symposium. There were 100 or so registered delegates, but once the Café had started, there were only 59 people in the Zoom room.

As there are always a few dropouts and a few people with technical problems, I always create slightly larger rooms than the usual 3 or 4 participants per room, which I think is ideal. So, I made 12 rooms that should have had five people in each.

When I assigned people to rooms, there was some confusion as people dropped back into the main room because they were the only ones in their room or there were only two. It took me a minute or two to figure out what had happened. Half of the participants, 33 people, had dropped out of the session, so instead of having 59 people in 12 rooms, I had 26 people in 12 rooms. Only just over two people per room. No wonder the problem! I only created six rooms for the second round of small group conversations, and all was good.

I’ve never had that degree of dropouts before. A simple rule going forward will be to ask people who do not intend to participate in the Café to log off before I assign rooms.

What I find interesting is that I find online talks and lectures mostly boring – the best part for me is the conversations in the breakout rooms. So I am pretty perplexed that half the people didn’t feel a conversation in the breakout rooms was valuable enough to stick around.

I noted that when the session restarted after a short break, 59 people were again online.