How to deal with diversity in research on and co-creation of online-Meetings?

The climate crisis and mobility restrictions driven on by the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a boom of online meetings. For sustainability and environmental reasons, it is crucial to increase the use of this mode of communication, thereby reducing traffic and pollution. Consequently, it is essential that online meeting technologies facilitate inclusion and belonging in digital spaces. Virtual communication can exacerbate existing inequalities, for example, the fact that women are more likely to be overlooked or ignored in online meetings (Armentor-Cota 2011; Connley 2020). Moreover, age and level of education can negatively affect receptivity to technology (NeXR 2020; Buchebner-Ferstl et al. 2020). Therefore, with the FEMtech research project FairCom we aimed to contribute to the development of inclusive online meeting solutions. Furthermore, when planning FairCom, we to consider gender beyond the binary conception in an applied research and development project. Based on observations, interviews and an online-survey of user requirements and exclusion mechanisms, personas and user scenarios were developed. In a participatory process, ideas for solutions and design approaches were developed in cooperation with various user groups. In this paper, we will discuss how we managed to account for the diversity of meeting participants throughout the research process, as well as the obstacles we encountered and our attempts to overcome them. In addition, we want to determine how we can improve our practice of coping with diversity and contribute to learnings and further development based on our practical experience. This text is therefore intended as a report on practical experiences in a research process that wants to contribute to an open and failure-friendly exchange of approaches in research. In the outset, we want to demonstrate how we designed the data collection instruments to identify user habits and needs of a diverse user group. Then we will focus on the major challenge of incorporating a diverse sample of potential users into the needs assessment and the co-creation of potential solutions. Finally, we will discuss the difficulty of shedding more light on the topic of "making diversity visible". The co-creation workshops demonstrated that the participants came up with a wide variety of solutions, but unfortunately, in relation to the objective of addressing the diversity of participants in online meetings, there were only a few suggestions