Engineering · 3 min read

Transcending our isolation with BWAMP by Fullstory

How we're making fully remote meetings more fun, more connected, more... BWAMP 🎉

Imagine you’re standing up in front of your team or even your whole company. You’re giving a killer presentation on how to make your customers happier, how to cut your costs, or how to make your coworkers' lives easier. You come to the very end of your talk:

“So that’s it, and thank you so much to Jess, Sanjay, and Josh who helped put this all together!”

The crowd goes wild! Applause, cheers, whooping. Except... it's May of 2020 and everyone is working remotely.

You’re not really with your team. You’re sitting at home and presenting over a video call. Everyone is muted except for you. Maybe they loved it. Maybe they hated it? You can’t hear a thing. You can't read the audience, so you’ll never know ... and neither will they because they can’t hear each other. There's no way for the group to come to any kind of shared sentiment.

Everyone is completely emotionally disconnected.

Enter BWAMP 🎉

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Technology to the rescue. BWAMP bridges the emotional communication gap, bringing your remote workforce closer together no matter the physical or virtual distance.

BWAMP is a separate feedback channel that runs alongside video meetings. Now, the audience will be able to participate directly (and instantly) with vital feedback to the speaker: applause, laughter, clinking glasses, or (of course) bwamps!

Cheerful noises and floating emoji bubbles make BWAMP an audio+visual experience. “Can you see my screen?” 👍 ("Yes!"). “Many thanks to Rachel for her support on this project.” 🍻🥂 ("Clink!"). And so on.

Listen and watch to see which members of your team are engaged. Just don't BWAMP too loudly while your friends are speaking, or somebody may try to revoke your BWAMP privileges. And don't forget that volume slider if things get too noisy!

bwamp-app

BWAMP
The BWAMP app in action.

Add a Little BWAMP to Your Next Team Meeting

If you're ready to give BWAMP a try, getting started is easy. Here’s how:

  1. Go! 🌎 to bwamp.me, and

  2. Tell 📣 your teammates to go to bwamp.me, too!

  3. Log in ⌨️ using Google or Slack with your work account (this puts you in a private "space" with your coworkers).

    • If you're logged in with a company email address, you'll be redirected to URLs like bwamp.me/mycompany.com/.

    • If you need to include folks outside of your organization, use the RANDOM SECRET ROOM link on the account/login page to create a room with an unguessable name on bwamp.me/public/ — the universally accessible "public" domain.

  4. Fire up a meeting 🔥 on Google Meet, Zoom, or whatever.

  5. BWAMP 🎉 your coworkers to show them you care.

Now that you're up and running, use these tips to BWAMP like a pro:

🚦 The sounds are arranged in order of disruptiveness. You might want to use the ones towards the bottom judiciously! 🐴🐴🐴

🔐 Need separate “spaces” for separate meetings? Just add a “name” to the URL:

❤️ And if you enjoy BWAMPTweet us some love (or feedback). Or share BWAMP on Facebook or even LinkedIn.

Connection is a Two-Way Street

Behind the irreverent veneer, BWAMP solves a very real problem for us here at Fullstory. It makes our remote meetings—especially the big ones—fun and engaging. It adds back that camaraderie we all desperately need, ensuring we can do our best work and stay connected to each other no matter the screens and distance that separates us.


P.S. Building more perfect digital experiences (in this case, adding a human touch back into the world of remote meetings) is fundamental to everything we do at Fullstory. If you want to learn more about how we’re working to improve the world of online experiences for real humans, please check us out.

Want a perfect website or app? Fullstory can help. Request a demo today.

author

Scott Blum

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Systems engineer at Fullstory since 2015. Formerly at Square. Formerly Google Web Toolkit compiler guy. Committer on Apache Solr and Apache Curator.