Engage Your Coworking Community Online with Video Rooms

In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need of coworking communities that bring people together is stronger than ever. The coworking industry won’t be the same from now on. For the last several weeks, countless operators asked us for advice on how to engage their coworking community online.

In this context, being adaptive in terms of communication and using the proper coworking apps could be key to succeeding.

To further our attempts of helping with this challenge, we’ve integrated a video conference infrastructure. It’s integrated directly into our Web Member Portal. Your members just need to login to the OfficeRnD web member portal and voilà! They can start chatting to their fellow coworkers.

Brought to you with the help of Jitsi (read more about them below), this feature aims to help coworking and flex spaces bring their online community closer together.

How Video Rooms can engage your community online

Once this feature is activated, a new page will appear in your Member Portal. The page is called Video Rooms (alternative names are supported). This page will be the doorway to the “Video Rooms” you’ve decided to create for your online community. In each room, your members can chat, hang out, ask you questions, or anything of the sort that comes to your mind.

Please note, that because of limitation introduced by Jitsi, the current version of the feature works on desktop browsers and it does NOT work on mobile browsers (i.e. members that open the Web Portal on mobile or the Mobile App).

Below we’ve put together a few ideas on how you can use Video Rooms, but please share the way you’re using it to help us improve it in a meaningful way.

1. The Building-replica approach – have a few rooms named by popular common spaces in your buildings:
   • The Kitchen – organize morning coffee chatters or similar “events” here
   • The Reception – a room in which an admin can always be present and answer general questions or just be there for the members
   • The Canteen – people can have lunch together here, just hang out while eating in front of their desks
   • The Game Room – a place where people can play fun games through video or just find a peer who wants to play FIFA online
2. The Events approach – name a few rooms by topics and popularise them through your community as you do for events
   • Morning Coffee – a room in which you can find peers early in the morning just hanging out
   • Knowledge sharing – a room in which you can organize knowledge sharing sessions on specific topics or just let people discuss anything

How to Activate Video Rooms

If you’d like us to activate Video Rooms for you, just send us an email at [email protected] and make sure to include in it the following information:

• Name of the page in our member apps
• Type of Icon for the page in our member apps
• Names of the Rooms you want to have in there
• Position in the navigation
  • In the Web Portal – how far up in the left-side navigation

Share your feedback

This is our first stab of enabling video conferencing directly in our Member Apps. We thought of numerous applications of this and all of them sound exciting. But we’ll need your help to figure out which ones bring the most value so we can hone in on them. 

You can submit your feedback through our standard support channels ([email protected]) or directly in our dedicated topic for Video Rooms in our community portal.

About Jitsi

Jitsi is a completely free and secure videoconferencing solution. The platform is used as a preferred tech infrastructure solution by giant corporations like Comcast. You can learn more about them at https://jitsi.org/.