Teleconferencing... Video-conferencing... Web Meetings... Web-casting...

It's all the same basic need... How do we best facilitate a cyberspace meeting, instead of a real-world meeting.  We want to accomplish the same things, but without spending the gasoline.

• The ability to open TWO-way dialog.
• Face-to-face interactions can be way more compelling than faceless audio.
• Common screen (workspace) for everyone... much like a white-board in a physical meeting (or .ppt).
• Connect everyone to each other, for ongoing future impact together.
• Allow sidebar chat conversations... (You can't stop 'em anyway, so we might as well capture the transcript of those chat-notes.)
• Roll up conclusions and 'marching-orders'... using a wiki-like common document.
• Archive everything for retrieval.

Here were some suggestions from friends...

• from Michael Limatta... Acrobat 'Connections'  (search 'Acrobat Connections') -- It was hard trying to find much info on it, and I didn't have a lot of time to do so. (Neil)

   

• from Chris Walker... Do you want to present slides, or just conference call? I use gotowebinar, but it doesn't do audio over the internet. People still have to use a landline.   I participated in one of Chris's webcasts -- it was ok, not great for a 2-way communications tool.  Again though, I didn't have enough time to truly research it a lot. (Neil)
• from Kiel Kinnaman... WebEx.  (Anybody check this out?  Is it free?)  (Neil)
• from Dwayne Vassell... Well there is always myspace & a new one called twitter & google has a beta program called google lively!  (Cool idea... if we only wanted to chat.  We may want to try it sometime.  It at least raises the question of using avatars... and Second Life type of meeting.  (Neil)
• from AlxConn... I have a Ventrillo server that we can easily use to get fairly large real-time group audio discussions going that should work fine even on dial-up. Audio quality is great, and it doesn't require much machine to run at all. Clients are available for both PC and Mac.

   

  I find this is better than trying to do a video / skype / conference call (phone & skype) because of a few reeasons:

   

  1) Doesn't bog down even slow internet connections

  2) Allows the user to continue using their PC to take notes, research, chat, etc.

  3) Keeps the background noise down by employing "push to talk" where one assigns a spare key (like the right control key) to be the "talk" button so that we don't have a ton of open microphones with just people breathing and air conditioners, fans, kids, etc. making noise.

   

  This would also allow for people to "listen in" to the meeting without worrying about disturbing the rest of the group if they have other primary things to focus on.

   

  This may well be a practical fall-back position we may reach someday.  But for now, I'd really like to push the envelope... not only for our own usage, but also so as to be testing something that we may recommend to others, nationally.... eg. MAC or CCDA, etc.  (Neil)

• from Aaron Boyer... DimDim.com "I found this web conference option out there and it is free for 20 or less users. It seems to hit all the major requirements that you have and it can do audio from the PC/Laptop. for a fee you can also do larger conferences.   I'm experimenting with it somewhat.  This may well be something we'll at least want to try out in the early going.  (Neil)

 Looks like we haven't yet recognized an 'obvious' choice... So let's try testing DimDim.com and see what we learn.  ...(Neil)