One page, one login, everything else refers to it

At The Wisdom Seat, where I'm board president, we run events on Zoom most days. For a long time, each one had its own Zoom meeting. A volunteer would log into the shared Zoom account, create a new meeting, copy the link, paste it into Wix, paste it into the confirmation email template, maybe paste it into a follow-up note, and then do it all again for the next event.

Every step in that chain is a place it can break. Wrong link in the confirmation email. Right link but no passcode. Passcode on the website but not in the calendar invite...then it is 6 PM and three people in our community can't find the Zoom room.

Most of our volunteers are not technical, and neither are many of the people coming to our programs. For some of them, "open the email, click the link, type the passcode when asked" is a confusing and difficult task.

I wanted to change this to make it as easy as possible for community members to join, while still protecting the meeting from being scraped off the open web.

Making this both easy and protected turned out to be harder than I expected. Making it easy is something I can do, and so is making it protected. The harder thing is doing both at once so the person on the other end never has to notice the protected part, and most of that work is invisible by design.

One room, reused

The move was to stop creating a new meeting every time. Instead, we set up a small number of recurring rooms with no end times, each one with a Zoom link that never changes. Think of them like actual rooms in a building. The room is always there, and a host unlocks the door when it's time.

Three rooms:

• TWS Practice Hall: for most public programs (weekly sits, monthly gatherings, community care, and more)
• TWS Lojong Hall: for the Tuesday Lojong class, because it auto-records
• Monday Morning Meditation: co-hosted with Susan Piver and Michael Carroll

Each zoom room is a button on our website. We now have one page for the links, one login, and everything else just refers to it.

To communicate this to our community, we chose a members-only page at https://www.thewisdomseat.org/zoom. Log in once as a community member and the browser remembers you. After that, the rooms are one click away.

So the tradeoff I considered and made peace with was: the worst case is that someone joins a meeting uninvited, and the host removes them. That is something our volunteers can handle. But a whole community that cannot find the right zoom meeting is a worse outcome.

What's next

The permanent rooms go into full use for all events starting May 1. That means there are some things we can simplify. Our Wednesday meditation page, for one, currently has an email signup form as the gate to getting the zoom info. Once we switch over, that form can go away, replaced by a single button that just says "join." This is one fewer thing for a community member to do, and one fewer thing for me to maintain.

I'm just clearing the path so people can actually get to the practice.