Alternatives to ‘meeting’

Virtual tools to do some, or all, of your meeting offline

• ConceptBoard – even though this is an excellent resource for more involved meetings it can also provide an ongoing repository for offline updates and feedback both between meetings and independently of them. It has huge potential for including templates that can facilitate whatever discussions you need
• Trello – is a Kanban board on steroids. It has amazing potential to visualise progress, keep updates, provide the backbone for a meeting, allocate tasks, and generally manage everything (literally everything – we used Trello to manage every aspect of my previous organisation)
• Slack – allows you to keep threads of dialogue going across a range of topics, and to include and update people as you need to
• Microsoft Teams – provides a means to ‘chat’ through ideas and situations together, and to keep in communication with your colleagues on key topics – it is also a videoconferencing solution, for when the ‘chat’ gets a bit involved
• Google Docs, in general, and in particular the following (you will need to create a free Google account if you do not already have one)
  • Google draw which you can share in real-time and which can act like a giant section of wall for you to add a template, and people to contribute their ideas and thoughts
  • Google_sheets which enables you to explore analyses and run simulations, and to capture plans and track progress
  • Google slides which enable you to embed iFrames as backgrounds to particular slides, and capture a series of different inputs, and of course to present those inputs
• Tricider, which enables asynchronous debate on a decision and the criteria and information put forward by others to support different outcomes
• AnswerGarden, which collates inputs into a wordcloud as a basis for brainstorming and for identifying themes and furthering discussions
• DirectPoll, which is a very simple polling tool to enable on-line voting on a number of predefined options
• GetSatisfaction, which is a community Q&A tool which builds up a easily accessible and maintainable knowledgebase

• Polling software
• Decision Making Tools
• Collaborative Wordclouds
• Shared documents
• KanBan Software
• Shared Spreadsheets