Our club is pondering whether to hold its next monthly meeting as a virtual meeting due to coronavirus concerns.

I'm looking for inexpensive or free ways to have 50+ people attend a virtual meeting. I noticed today Google and Microsoft are temporarily opening up their enterprise meeting solutions for free to help organizations hold large meetings, so that may be an option.

73
Roman K7TXL

Skype

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zoom.us will give you an account for 45 minutes maximum for up to 100 attendees. 

A zoom pro account is about $150 for a year and you can host meetings for as long as you wish, but they need to be restarted after 24 hours.

73,

Mickey N4MB

Nope. I'll see you at Hamvention as will likely your Division team!

I'm flying to the Birmingham, AL, Birminghamfest this weekend.

Corona virus - BAH! I'm going to live my life. If I get sick, I'll deal with it then.

73, 

Mickey N4MB

For what it's worth, I am a master gardener, we do webinars each month and use ZOOM.  It works out well and has a pretty low learning curve.  I would recommend a training period and perhaps a live mini meeting to test the technology as stated above.  I would also like to state that with zoom you can record meetings for those that cannot live attend and have the participants access it later.  It is a recording and they can only view not participate.  Perhaps you can also post a forum such as this one in conjunction with a recorded meeting for further discussion and comment?  Just a thought.  I am a nurse and not really panicked about Covid 19 mostly due to the low mortality rate (although much higher in compromised or older patients ~ 15%)  The flu on the other hand is taking out thousands and is a little less contagious with an R0 of 1-2.  I think being prepared for social distancing and a practice session is very sensible of your club.  This is particularly cogent if you have a greater percentage of your club over 55 years old.  The R0 for Covid 19 is about 2-3.  To give you an example of R0 for something like Measles (exquisitely infectious) is R0=12-18 which means that R0 is the number of other people an infected individual spreads the disease to.  So 1 person spreads it to 2 to 3 other people in the case of Covid 19 whereas Measles spreads it from 1 person to 12-18 other people.  You can see exponential growth in Measles.  The Covid 19 really requires much closer contact for a longer period of time.  Nursing homes are a particular concern along with hospitals and emergency rooms.  Very young children either are not getting it or it is so mild a case that they are not showing symptoms.  Middle age is getting mild cases with the older you are the more severe the case with a fatality rate close to 15% over about 70.  A little lower over 55.  Age really does make a massive difference with this disease and this country is doing very little in the way of testing.  My husbands co-worker came back from a hotspot in Italy with zero questions upon reentry or screening or quarantine of any kind.  No one even cautioned him to look out for fever, cough, tired, or any symptoms at all.  He visited for 3 weeks and went to two hotspots in Italy.  Just saying, we have no idea at all for how many cases are in this country.  The flu this year has killed 16,000 so far with an estimated toll of ~ 30,000 for the 19-20 season.  It has infected millions.  It is less contagious than Covid-19 and we have a vaccine (mostly) for it.  Quoted numbers as of Feb 28-source CDC.