We present HyWay, short for “Hybrid Hallway”, to enable mingling and informal interaction among in-person and remote users in semi-structured and unstructured hybrid settings. Key to the design of HyWay is bridging the awareness gap between physical and virtual users and providing the virtual users the same agency as physical users. We explain how HyWay achieves these goals with an agile, light touch approach that centers on commodity hardware, frictionless bootstrapping, and a deploy-learn-refine flywheel to improve the system continually. We present our learnings from multiple deployments and discuss ongoing research aimed at weaving together more tightly the virtual and the physical realms.