Ready to host an all-hands meeting in your Gather remote office? Awesome! From customizing their characters to finding teammates or an open seat, staff will quickly discover the joy of Gather that a simple video call lacks. 

The following article provides a brief explanation of how the All-Hands Room works, then follows up with some recommendations for running the meeting.

About Your All-Hands Room

All-Hands Rooms are typically designed with a stage or spot for presenters and multiple seating areas. The stage includes at least one Spotlight tile, which is indicated by an orange megaphone on the floor. When you’re ready to start the meeting, step onto a Spotlight tile.

Step onto a spotlight tile to broadcast to the whole room. An orange label with a megaphone indicates who is in the spotlight.

Spotlight Tiles

• When you’re on a Spotlight tile, you broadcast your audio, video, and screen (if you share it) to everyone in the Room (not to the entire Space).
• You know who's in the spotlight (including yourself) by the orange megaphone label on the speaker's video or screen share.
• When you're in the spotlight, you will only be able to hear people within 5 tiles of you.
• You can welcome another person on stage, and both of you can be spotlighted at the same time. (In fact, multiple people can be spotlighted at once! But we recommend keeping to fewer than 10. Read how to add Spotlight tiles, if needed.)
• Invite staff to walk up to the stage spotlight to ask questions or to post in Chat.
• The Spotlight feature should only be used in Rooms with under 100 people. 

Private Areas

The All-Hands Room has multiple seating areas. The seating spots are separate private areas, which means everyone in the area connects with each other's audio and video, but also to the person on the spotlight. 

Most seating spots are private areas, where everyone connects to each other's a/v, as well as to the spotlighted presenter. 

Video Carousel

The video carousel offers several different views of video feeds—just click on any video or screen share to enlarge. (Note there is no fullscreen option at this time.) You can turn off others' audio or video, which turns off their a/v connection to you, not to anyone else. Adjust anyone's volume by hovering on their feed, selecting the three dots, and using the volume slider. 

Chat

Chat is a great way for staff to ask questions or comment during the meeting! Chat has options to message a person directly, to those seated within the same named Private Area as you, or to Everyone. 

Notice that Jasmine is sitting in the private area named C1 (with 1 user there). So when she opens the chat menu, there's a tab on the left to chat with nearby C1 friends. Then there's a building icon tab on the right to chat with everyone. 

Emotes

Encourage everyone to use the #1-6 keys to send emotes. (You can customize #1-5, but #6 will aways be a raised hand.)

Running the Meeting

We've got a few ideas for running a successful all-hands:

• Spread the Word:  To get your staff into the Gather All-Hands Room, you can include the link to your specific All Hands meeting room in the meeting invite. Learn more about how to grab a specific meeting location link to help your team join in one-click! Ten or fifteen minutes before the meeting, post the office link in your Slack or team chat and encourage people to pop in early to explore.

• Ask Me Anything: Wrap up your meeting with a Q&A session or ask-me-anything spotlight. Participants can walk up to the stage to ask, or submit questions via Chat or a Google form. 
• Plan a Social: For Gather pros, you can also add a Room, picking an Experience template (e.g., experience-taking-sides, racetrack, speed-gathering, tetris-tournament, etc.). Just plop a portal down in the All-Hands Room to the social! 
• Get in touch! Reach out to us if you have any questions or need support.