What are some benefits of meditating in a group over meditating in a solitary environment?
If you meet in a group in person, perceiving other people who go deeply into a meditative state usually helps you to go deeper in the state yourself.
Even when you aren't consciously aware of the breathing rates of the people around you, your brain does pick them up.
I'm not sure that you get the same effect via a skype call or whether you lose too much effects of physical presence.
When meditating in a group, I am better motivated, more enthusiastic and more concentrated. That makes a big difference.
Is the idea to have one person who is leading/orchestrating the meditation, rather than meditating themselves?
(As I understand it, not having engaged in the study hall myself, one of the advantages is that you expect other people to monitor you - and if everyone is engaged in monitoring/assisting, I don't think anybody will actually be meditating)
No, the idea is to just meditate together.
The only orchestration that meditation needs is starting and ending signals.
As for the monitoring, you cannot monitor the meditation itself, only the posture. This might indeed be useful, but I wouldn't assign it a high priority. Most important is doing meditation at all and concentration. Besides, correcting posture might be problematic to do per webcam, and impossible to do without disrupting the meditation.
As someone who has aspired to more meditation, I think this is a great idea because it seems the limit on my meditating more is isomorphic with the problem of my not getting in more pomodoro work sessions.
Actually, the social motivation to not quitting early might be more helpful with meditation. Once I actually start working, I'm pretty set to continue working. Once I'm meditating, I have pretty constant urges to be done with it. In a theoretical LW Meditation Hall, I would be mortified to let people see me give up after a mere 5 minutes.
That said, I think that if I were interested in meditating for about 25 minutes, then the existing LW Study Hall might be a great place to start. They already have a very close set of norms, and I just need people to know that I should be meditating.
Tried it out, managed to save my meditation goal and meditate for longer than I usually do.
Lets make up a LW Meditation Hall, analog to the LW Study Hall.
Judging from my own (limited) experience, meditation might profit even more from doing it together than working.
It should work more or less like the study hall, with one exception:
Sessions need to be scheduled in advance (There is probably not enough interest in meditation to keep the hall filled 24/7, and people will want to take part from the beginning instead of stumbling in in the middle).