New Meeting Type
There is now a new meeting category – meeting_and_online (hybrid), which is a hybrid of in-person and online meetings. You will find the information about this in Fellowship Alerts: https://acawso.org/category/fellowship-alert/
When you update your meeting, or start a new meeting, you can now choose this option.
So why is this new option a good idea? When Covid-19 started impacting our in-person meetings in 2020, most of our groups began meeting online, hoping that before long they would be back to in-person meetings. Many updated their meeting listing to include information that said the group was temporarily meeting online and provided Zoom or other information. That was very straightforward. They were meeting online until they could go back to their meeting facility.
But as time passed and they realized Covid wasn’t going away soon, many groups changed their Meeting Type from “Meeting,” (referring to in-person/face-to-face) to “Online.” The impact of this change was that even though they kept their same meeting number, it removed the meeting from the geographic in-person listing and moved it to the online listing. Because they became harder for to find, some groups even created a separate meeting so they were listed in both categories, with the new listing starting with WEBxxx. This lack of consistency has become problematic. Not only do we have an inaccurate count of actual registered ACA meetings, but some people have asked, “Where do I look to find that great meeting I went to last year that is not in the in-person listing anymore? Maybe it folded – or changed days and times – or something . . .”
If your meeting currently has 2 listings, please do the following:
- Update the meeting listing that you wish to keep and change the type to meeting_and_online (hybrid).
- Update the meeting that is the duplicate and indicate in the Message box that this meeting should be expired – and add a date of three days in the future for the expiration. This extra time will allow for the complete processing of the request to become a hybrid meeting on the backend.
If you were originally an in-person meeting and believe that your group will someday go back to that format, even if it is a combination of in-person and online, we suggest you keep your original meeting number and expire the newer number. Many groups are hoping to figure out how to do that combination of being in-person and somehow having online presence from newer people, especially those who have joined their meeting from outside of their geographic area. We have become stronger in our recovery family because of the global connections we have made.
Specific online access or other meeting-specific information can continue to be entered in the “Any additional information on how to find the meeting:” field.
If you have problems with any of this process, please send an email to [email protected]
