For Users – How to Set Up a Computer to Participate in Hangouts

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Here are instructions how to set up your computer to participate in our webinars and spontaneous hangouts.

Hangouts are done by a team which is exceptionally arrogant towards making it user friendly. But this is a free tool and in terms of results, and features it is actually better than paid competitors. So we are sticking to it for now. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Once you practice it becomes pretty handy and easy.

Here are simple steps:
SETTING UP HANGOUTS FOR PARTICIPATION
Install Chrome or firefox if you don’t have one of two. (If you use Internet Explorer – I recommend switching to Chrome)
Create or find your Google Plus page.
Locate on it Hangouts.
Create a Hangout on air – just for practice. (It will prompt you to isntall Hangouts, do that).
You will see black Hangout window
Once you see your video and once you see that when you speak the volume indicator moves, you should be fine.
Once our hangout starts, locate participation link and click on it and if you are lucky, you will be in. Mute your microphone while not speaking (There is a mute button on the top).

ADDITIONAL TIPS:
Notice a gear icon, you can change your mic and camera settings there, use automatic volume.
Make sure your face is lit up and point the camera so that your face is on the top of the screen, not the bottom (because the bottom of the screen is blocked in Hangouts, it is a little bug there). Adjust lighting or your position to lit up your face and make sure it looks natural color (electric incandescent lamp from above helps to make it look natural).

PARTICIPATION
It is inconvenient, but we don’t have a way to allocate places in our hangouts. On Saturdays we often have more people than we can accommodate. There are only 10 places, so many viewers are “watching only” and can not speak.
So we post the participation link and watching link here and people jump in the hangout, first come first serve. Once it is full, the rest of people just watches using watching link.
I encourage the viewers to start additional hangouts instead.

Also sometimes we have technical troubles and we don’t start right on time, so people have extra time of disappointment. I wish we develop a better system, but this is what we have now, it is free to set up and works.

(Organizers, lets update this page to perfection and refer new members to it)

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