It’s great to have a lot of minds work in one room together (or, in this case, in one mural!). But with more minds comes more ideas and lots of activity within a mural, which could become distracting.

This article is a review of how crowd optimization fuels innovation at scale. Explore the thresholds for large sessions of concurrent collaborators and the automated, streamlined experience crowd optimization introduces. Mural's crowd optimization is a built-in, automatic feature that adjusts certain settings to ensure sessions run smoothly.

Large events, webinars, and icebreakers (among other engagements) help facilitate the invaluable exchange and co-creation of ideas. As the volume of concurrent collaborators expands, Mural’s crowd optimization automatically helps sessions scale and run smoothly, enabling everyone to work better together.

Before reviewing the thresholds and simplified experience non-facilitators will have in a collaborative session, let’s recap the active roles within a mural:

Facilitator: The mural member who has access to the set of Facilitation Superpowers®. The facilitator serves as the session liaison, helping guide groups of any size through workshops, icebreakers, live-events or other collaborative engagements.

Collaborator: The members, guests, or visitors exploring, collaborating, and contributing to a mural session (adding stickies, feedback, reactions, etc.). Collaborators are led by the facilitator.

To support larger collaborative sessions, we’ve introduced the following thresholds to optimize the experience. When a session reaches any of these limits, Mural will automatically enact crowd optimization to seamlessly support the growing engagement. That’s right—a facilitator doesn’t need to enable or adjust any settings, Mural will automatically optimize the session based on the volume of concurrent participants.

When the 501st collaborator joins your mural, everyone currently in that mural will be greeted with a pop-up indicating the mural is a bit crowded:

At 500 collaborators, facilitators will still retain all Facilitation Superpowers, but other collaborators within that mural will:

This threshold works similarly to the smaller threshold (500 concurrent collaborators). When a mural’s concurrent participants count reaches 1,000, the 1,001st person to join will be greeted with a pop-up noting the session is full (existing collaborators will not see this message). At this threshold the mural is automatically locked at 1,000 concurrent collaborators, and the pop-up recommends any new collaborators (1,001+) return to the dashboard and join at a later time. This is necessary to improve performance and maintain smooth collaboration for your collaborators.

As with the previous threshold, facilitators can continue facilitating and other currently active collaborators will still be able to contribute and enjoy the streamlined experience.

Looking to facilitate an org-wide icebreaker? Interested in collecting feedback and ideas during a large virtual event? Explore how Mural can help you collaborate effectively in larger settings! If you’ve hosted or have ideas for using Mural during heavily attended sessions, we’d love for you to share your experience with our Mural Community. If you have any questions, be sure to connect with Mural Support.