[NCUC E-team] today's hangout

[William Drake]

Hi

I watched about a half hour of it and thought it a good first step.  I don't believe NCUC has ever used Google hang outs; worth considering.  Don't know how easy document sharing etc is…

Once we're in the swing of things, probably good to archive these somewhere easily identifiable by members and others for transparency.

So, I've sort of bugging this team mildly on the point that the quicker you come to some recommendations about platforms to use, the quicker other teams can start to scale up more effectively and the whole enterprise begins to take on a noticeable thingness.  Aside from getting listservs started, it'd be good to sort out a couple of basic points like should we use something like Basecamp that integrates mail and archived web material, or some other groovy tools I don't know about, so that each teams' work is cumulative and easily searchable.  Similarly, it'd be good to decide where team members might build personal pages and then encourage them to do so, so we all appear to be real humans other members and such can connect with more easily.  To me, the Ning site at least offered the easy Group formation with comm between and Personal pages with friending and all that.  But you guys all seem to think the Ning is archaic and stinky; so can we come up with groovy alternative soon that's not a barrier for folks in low bandwidth situations?

If so, it'd be really great to make this a priority.

So too the general ncuc members list, which makes NPOC very happy.

Any chance you folks will be able to lead a little discussion in LA letting us know where you are on this stuff, what the main options are, etc?  We'll have a unique situation with almost all the folks in "positions" being in LA together, so this would be a great chance to sound out people on remaining difficult choices, get some rough consensus, and then a mandate to go to the membership with "here's what we propose to do."


On Jan 22, 2013, at 8:18 AM, Tapani Tarvainen <ncuc at TAPANI.TARVAINEN.INFO> wrote:

> As people present probably realized, I don't function
> very efficiently at tele- or videoconferences -- I much
> prefer written communication, whether email, forums,
> or chats (roughly in that order).
> 
> One way which in my experience makes teleconferences
> much more efficient, at least for me, is to have
> someone acting as a secretary and keeping minutes
> real-time on some etherpad-type thing.
> In practice that someone generally has to be
> acting as chair as well, or at least chair and
> secretary must know each other well, so it
> does place a bit of a burden on the chair.
> 
> As a bit light-weight alternative, using
> the chat feature for calling agenda and
> summarizing what's been decided at each
> point works fairly well, too.
> 
> But relying on spoken communication only,
> especially when sound quality is bad and
> video doesn't work, is very hard for me.
> (I'm eagerly waiting for Wilson's summary
> of what actually happened yesterday.)
> 
> It will get easier when we get to know each
> other better and get more used to the features
> of google hangout or whatever we use
> (maybe I'll learn to mute when typing &c),
> and it might be better if it was done in
> a bit more formal fashion (people requesting
> turns to speak by raising hands or something),
> but I'd still like to suggest we try to see how well
> chat (irc, skype chat, whatever) works for us.
> 
> -- 
> Tapani Tarvainen
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