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

For remote participants, the path is a personal link plus identity confirmation — typically a one-time passcode by email, with higher-assurance verification available as a premium option. See Inviting and Onboarding Participants and Identity Verification Levels.

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.