Never wonder who is—and isn’t—in a large group video chat again, thanks to the “reserved seating” video meeting system!

Background:

Occasionally, a video meeting will be scheduled with a large number of participants.

The Issue:

Since the participants are usually only arranged based on who is actually present in a meeting, it can be hard to figure out exactly who has (and hasn’t) shown up, especially if the meeting has 10+ participants.

For example, in Figure 1, a meeting has started, but the presenter is trying to remember if important participants are still missing. Should the presentation start? Who knows!

Fig. 1: In this normal video meeting, we can unfortunately only see the video chat boxes of the people who are **actually present** already (at left). So the presenter may wonder—was Joe from Accounting supposed to be on this meeting? Should we wait for anyone else before starting the meeting? The organizer will have to poke around in a calendar to see who is supposed to be in this meeting.

Proposal:

The solution is simple: when a person has accepted a meeting, they are allocated a “reserved spot” in the video chat grid. Then, as soon as the meeting starts, their spot displays a “So-and-so has not yet joined the meeting” indicator (Figure 2).

Once the user joins the meeting, their video is displayed in this reserved spot.

***Fig. 2:*** *No need to wonder who has joined the meeting yet—we can see right here in the participants list that three people are still missing. Now to shame them relentlessly for their tardiness!* *That will foster a healthy work culture for sure.*

Conclusion:

This might be a legitimately useful feature! No more wondering if stragglers will stumble into a meeting late, or having to consult a long possibly-alphabetical guest list to see if a person is present or not (since their “THIS PERSON IS MISSING” spot in the video chat grid will make it extremely obvious).

PROS: Helps the person running the meeting know whether or not they should start it.

CONS: Makes it harder for someone to slip out of a meeting unnoticed.