as the world slowly closed down March 2019, I was heavily involved with the Ann Arbor Zen Buddhist Temple. The temple was very much reluctant to engage in any digital teaching or community for the first several weeks. When it became clear that Cove it was lasting, and I and a group of three other people worked with the temple to create a virtual space for teachings and community. This was a hodgepodge of software and hardware solutions to create live stream teachings, and chanting's as well as breakout rooms. The most interesting part of the project was figuring out how to teach the Buddhist priests to run all of the technology, as we were not allowed to be in the same room as them for months at a time due to medical concerns.
Hardware
The Buddhist temple would keep used a cartons around just in case they ever be useful again. We also did us in a $1.2 million building which was always a crazy level of juxtaposition to me. There was several hardware acquisitions to enable this process, including a few cameras and a microphone, as well as a movable tripod.
Software
Using zoom, OBS and stream deck, we were able to create a software stack complex enough to handle multiple cameras and microphones yes, simple enough to train non-technical 50 something plus year olds on.
Live Stream Production
Content Editing
During each live stream, I would make notes of clips that could be used for email, marketing and social media. And then edit these clips out of the main lifestream and publish them on social media. This process works surprisingly well until the Buddhist leader ship felt that we were being too capitalistic and engaging in a social media platform that they did not support. So the project was shut down for being too effective. Ha! It turns out having a digital marketing guy running your digital marketing can actually get you somewhere. And if you don't want to be in the hotspot, then that's actually a problem.