In our effort to support developer communities around the world, we’re excited to announce two ways in which we are helping groups host events and engage with their community members online:

• The ability to host an event on our Vonage Virtual Event Space on Remo, an online networking event platform
• Social Cafe, an open-source demo for communities to build their own online environment which we also host an instance

Both answer a core challenge in running online events – having meaningful conversations between attendees instead of just broadcasting.

Hosting Events in the Vonage Virtual Event Space

Remo is a platform that does a great job of creating a conference-like experience. We’ve called our Remo account the Vonage Virtual Event Space.

As well as broadcasting to your room of attendees and interactive Q&A sessions, it supports face-to-face conversations between your guests through video calls. On the virtual floor-plan, people can move around tables and drop in and out of different video calls. This way, you don’t miss the hallway track!

With the Vonage Virtual Event Space, we can host up to 800 attendees at no cost. Our team will run the event from a technical and moderation standpoint, so you can just focus on bringing your communities and speakers together. We’ll also publish your event on our Community page and promote it through our social media.

What we ask from you is to have a Code of Conduct (CoC) in place for your online event and that the event is free of charge to your attendees. If you don’t have an existing CoC we ask that you use the Vonage Developer Community one.

If you’re a developer event organiser, community leader, or member and want to host an event on our Vonage Virtual Event Space, please complete this form at least two weeks before your event, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Using the Social Cafe Demo

We also wanted to offer a scalable solution to every community, as we may not be able to host all event requests for our Vonage Virtual Event Space.

The Social Cafe Demo is an open-source project ideal for communities wanting a social space or study groups. You could use it to run a networking event for your tech community (or after an online event), host study groups for your educational community, or simply host separate conversations for your local community who still wants to talk in a time of isolation.

Every event lobby has several tables, with each table being a video call, powered by the Vonage Video API. People can freely move between tables to chat with different community members.

You can submit a pull request to our repository to add your event to our hosted version at no cost or follow the steps to host your own version in five minutes. We’ve also written a tutorial if you want to know more about how the Social Cafe demo was put together or build your own from scratch.

Have questions? You can send us an email at community@vonage.com. We are continuously inspired by the work done by our community and hope to support you in moving your activities online.