Online meetings or chat groups

Organising meetings or chat groups

Where possible, use UCL e-mail addresses when inviting people to events or chat groups. This helps ensure they are who their e-mail indicates they are, and helps keep anything you might share with them (e.g. information or access) within UCL's account security.

Any participants of society/club-related group chats should hold an active membership to your group. A taster membership is the minimum requirement to participate in club/society-related chat groups, to ensure those participating in your group's activity, both in-person and online, are registered with the Union.

Consent to being in groups

For many platforms, it's important you don't add people to a group if they haven't consented to it.

For example, adding a club/society member to a Whatsapp group without asking them makes their basic contact information available to other group members, including their phone number, which they may not want.

Instead, send them a link via their UCL e-mail address with the details on how to sign up, so they can make the choice themselves.

Group chats should, ideally, be deleted and recreated annually, to ensure active and recent consent from all participants. If this is not feasible, groups should ask all group chat members to re-consent to their inclusion at least once per year.

Staying safe on Zoom and Microsoft Teams

There are a number of features that you can enable to make your meetings more secure and safe, which can be set right at the start when you schedule your meeting.

• Automatically generate a meeting ID
• Enable a meeting password
• Enable waiting room
• Lock the meeting once all attendees have joined
• Don't share your meeting link on social media 

Recommended software

For video meetings, all UCL students have free access through their UCL accounts to: 

• Microsoft Teams - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/services/communicate-collaborate/microsoft-teams 
• Zoom - https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/services/communicate-collaborate/zoom (recommended if any of your participants are based in China)

Other software should be used only if you can be confident the platform uses personal data responsibly. To work this out, find the data protection or privacy policy the software uses to make sure they don't sell user data for marketing purposes, and use personal data only for the purpose of the software. If there are any uses outside of what a participant might expect, let them know of this before they join.