Remote vs In-Person Participation

Not every assembly happens the same way. Some are fully online, some are held in a room, and many are a mix. Assembley supports all three so the digital record is consistent regardless of how people attend. This article explains the differences.

The three modes

You choose a meeting mode when you create an assembly:

• Remote: everyone participates online. Each voter receives a personal invitation, confirms their identity, and votes from their own device.
• In-person: the meeting takes place physically, with participation captured digitally so attendance and votes still produce a verifiable record.
• Hybrid: some participants are in the room and others join remotely, all feeding the same record.

The mode is set on the assembly itself; see Creating Your First Assembly.

How participants join

How participants reach their ballot depends on how the assembly is set up, not on where they sit. In an invited assembly, each member gets a personal link by email and enters the meeting code shown during the meeting. In a self-registration assembly, people scan the QR code or open the meeting link, register, and confirm with a one-time code sent to their email. See Inviting and Onboarding Participants and How People Join an Assembly.

For in-person participants, the goal is the same (a verifiable record of who was present and how they voted), captured through the live session in the room rather than individual remote invitations. In a hybrid meeting, both paths run at once and roll up into a single attendance and vote record.

Why one record matters

Whatever the mode, the value of running the assembly digitally is the same: a single, consistent record of attendance, quorum, and votes. A hybrid meeting where half the votes live in a spreadsheet and half in someone's memory is exactly the fragility a digital assembly removes. By bringing in-room and remote participation into the same record, the quorum calculation and the tally stay coherent, and the evidence package reflects the whole meeting. See The Evidence Package Explained.

Choosing a mode

Pick the mode that matches reality:

• If everyone is dialling in, choose remote.
• If you're gathering in a room, choose in-person.
• If you expect both, choose hybrid so neither group is left out of the record.

Where to go next

See Running a Live Assembly for what happens on the day, and Understanding Quorum for how presence is measured across modes.

This page is general information, not legal advice. Rules change and your articles of association may differ, so check the current rules or ask an adviser before you rely on it.