You and I are having a video conference call. I can see you, you can see me, and we are both alive. This is a live, face-to-face, online meeting. There is nothing ‘virtual’ about it. Let us eradicate the word from our vocabulary, online meetings are real, rapidly becoming the new norm.

Physical meetings, when we are all together in the same room, are just that, physical meetings. Or you could call them single venue meetings. My preference however, is to call them offline meetings, supporting the notion that online is the new normal way to meet.

Not all online meetings are face-to-face. This is a characteristic of the webinar, where participants are not sharing their video and in the case of a bad webinar, neither is the speaker.

What about live streaming of an online or physical meeting? What kind of meeting is that? Are the viewers of the live stream participating in the meeting? No, they are not, they are simply viewers of the live stream. To be a participant, you have to be able to do just that, participate, take an active part.

Some meetings are both online and offline, we call them hybrid. In some cases there are several physical meetings connected online, which makes them multi-hub hybrid meetings. Does a meeting become hybrid just because some participants are joining online, or if one of the speakers is presenting from a remote location? Yes, technically speaking these are hybrid meetings, but if there is no interaction between the online viewers or speakers and the people present in the room, it is probably not a very good hybrid meeting.

And finally, just to make sure, all meetings are synchronous, participants are attending at the same time. Anyone viewing parts or all of the meeting on demand afterwards is not attending the meeting.

You may not agree with my definitions, these are just my views, but I do hope you will join my campaign to eradicate the word ‘virtual’ from our vocabulary.