In the last few months I have been on many video meetings that use the “stack” method of facilitating speaking order. For those unfamiliar, the idea is that attendees of the meeting write the word “stack” into the call chat box to indicate they would like to speak. Anyone can stack at any time and speaking order is simply first come first serve. This just helps to reduce people speaking over each other or taking over the meeting.
The stack method works well, but it does put some extra work on the meeting facilitator to track the stacks in chat, which can be difficult in active chats or large meetings. Additionally, stack does not nest well. By that, I mean that if someone wants to stack to respond to a current speaker, and not just to speak to the general topic, extra work has to be handled by the facilitator to track that.
This is where stacker comes in. stacker is a simple webapp that allows users of a call to join a new room and stack as a direct reply to the current, short-term discussion (think of it as a reply stack), or stack onto the traditional stack.
stacker is hosted on heroku right now and welcome for anyone to use! I would love to get feedback from folks using this in their meetings.